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

David’s comments from the Paths to Wholeness group.

What book would you like us to read as a group?

Hi, Stephanie. In a way, each of the essays in the book was also like that. I started only with the sense that had something to say, then things came to me, and from me, until I found out what that was. Sometimes the crux of each piece came with the first draft, but more often not until I'd reworked it several times.

Hi, Travis. Welcome aboard! I look forward to hearing more from you here.

- David

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
- Carl Jung

Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas came about because my numbers were in alignment. When I began it, I’d just turned 60, was almost 20 years out from a life-altering event, and had been a psychotherapist for nearly 10 years. My intention was to distill into one volume what I’d gleaned from these experiences. As often happens with art, creating it brought about something more.

The path to the Flower Mandalas themselves goes back to 1993, when a series of medical errors nearly took my life. At the time I was an English grad student at the University at Albany. What happened in a hospital there, which included a near-death experience, divided my life into two parts: who I had been and who I was becoming. To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, it’s been a long, strange trip since then.

Ten years later, in 2003, I was still sorting out who that second David was. I was living in Gloucester, MA, and walked Good Harbor beach nearly every evening, usually at around sunset. It had been almost 25 years since I’d done any serious photography, but I found myself yearning to record the patterns of color and light I saw there, so I bought my first digital camera and took it with me on my walks.

I found this round of picture-taking to be a much different experience than the one I’d had back in the ’70s, when I was shooting street scenes in Manhattan and Brooklyn in harsh, grainy black-and-white. Then, I’d felt like a thief, grabbing and hoarding moments of unsuspecting people’s lives. Now, I felt more like a painter, taking in and reflecting on the slowly shifting landscape of light. I started carrying a camera nearly everywhere I went.

Because the image quality of early digital cameras was not up to what I was used to seeing with 35mm film, I taught myself how to manipulate images on my computer, hoping to improve them. I soon realized that once a file was on my hard drive, I could do anything I wanted with it.

Experimentally, I used an image editing program to transform photos of the clouds I’d been shooting into mandala-like images. I enjoyed both the effect and the process, so I tried it on images of other things – rocks, wood, textures. Then, I wondered what would happen if I “mandalaized” something that was already mandala-like and used the technique on a photo of a dandelion seedhead. That impulse led to my first Flower Mandala, which accompanies the essay “Acceptance.”

Each of the Flower Mandalas is derived from a flower snapshot I took as I walked through various neighborhoods, visited botanical gardens and flower shops, and spotted interesting flowers in the homes and gardens of people I knew. The process of going from flower photograph to finished mandala can take anywhere from a few hours in a single session to a sequence of multi-hour sessions spread out over two or three months. Working on the images at the pixel level feels like I’m reacquainting myself with the world I saw through magnifying glasses and microscopes as a boy, what William Blake called the “minute particulars.” At its best, the experience is a meditation.

I began making these mandalas at a time of personal turbulence. My choice of the hexagram as the underlying shape was initially subconscious, but I don’t believe it was accidental. Like the mandala form itself, the hexagram appears in the art of many cultures throughout world history. Composed of two overlapping triangles, it represents the reconciliation of opposites: male/female, fire/water, macrocosm/microcosm, as above / so below, God and man. Their combination symbolizes unity and harmony – qualities I needed then, and took wherever I could find them. That the hexagram is also called the Star of David was not lost on me.

Early in the process of creating the Flower Mandalas, I met with a painter who had been making mandalas for years. She suggested that each of these images was trying to tell me something. “Listen to what they’re saying,” she advised. So I hung prints around my apartment and made them the digital wallpaper on my computer desktop.

My painter friend was right. I discovered that looking at these images completed a loop: The mandala-making process distilled a feeling just below my awareness into something more distinctly felt, and looking at the completed mandala brought that enhanced feeling back into me, purified and amplified. With each iteration of the creating/receiving cycle, I felt a little more whole. The Flower Mandalas were more than merely another way to tinker with images. They were part of a continuing reintegration process that helped remedy the shattering aspects of my brush with death and its consequences. Listening to what they were telling me helped put the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again, a process essential to my later becoming a psychotherapist.

A year or two later, I began to think about a weekly meditation book that matched Flower Mandalas with a concept and a relevant, meditative quotation. I briefly looked at preexisting symbolic significances for flowers, such as the Chinese and 19th century British and American languages of flowers, but I didn’t resonate with them, so I went with my own associations. The process of matching Flower Mandalas to concepts was subjective and intuitive. Sometimes a mandala led me to a matching concept, and sometimes a concept led me to a matching mandala.

The quotations came to me in a similarly subjective manner. Many of them were pivotal at some point in my life and helped to initiate a permanent change in perspective. Others I took from authors I’ve long admired. A few I discovered only after I started this book, the quotes coming to me from chance comments, something I happened to be reading, or Internet quotation sites.

Once I matched images and quotes, I realized that I, too, had something to say about these concepts. The essays in this book have been a way to discover what I feel and think. I began each with a brain dump quickly poured out onto a blank screen. Then, as I wrote and rewrote, the real knowing began, with each pass through the text homing in on what was there to express.

The essays have continued an integrating process that began in the first moments following my near-death experience. “Acceptance” is chapter one because acceptance initiated a transformative shift – accepting that the path I’d been on as an English graduate student and aspiring fiction writer, though I’d been on it a very long time, was no longer my path, and that I had to embrace the one I was actually on. The remaining topics are in alphabetical order, the order in which I wrote them.

The structure of this book reflects how I experience internal change. Most of my major shifts in perspective began in a single moment, but it has taken a lifetime to turn insights into lasting alterations of thought, feeling, and action. The instantaneity of clicking a shutter, represented here by the Flower Mandala images, reflects the felt experience of insight. The linear flow of reading and writing, represented here by the quotations and essays, reflects the necessity of walking through time in order to fully enact new ways of being.

Two years after my near-death experience, I was in a support group for people who had survived near-death. I was still finding my way back into this world, and although I believed I had returned from the edge with something of value, I was also profoundly disoriented. Responding to my confusion, one of the group members made a wide half-circle gesture with his arm and said, “David, I think you’re one of those people who has to take the long way ’round.” He paused, his arm fully outstretched. “But when you get there,” he said, closing his hand into a fist and pulling it to his chest, “it’ll be important.”

What I do now as an artist, writer, and therapist does feel important. Through these skills, I hope to render a boon that, had I not taken that long, strange trip, I would never have been able to deliver.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, believed mandalas are a pathway to the essential Self and used them with his patients and in his own personal transformation. In this book, I hope to carry on Jung’s tradition of using art as a means for healing and personal growth – the primary purposes it has served for me.

- David J. Bookbinder

This book -- and then a series of trainings in Focusing I took later, which really solidified the concept and practice for me -- changed my life for the better, both personally and professionally, and Focusing continues to help on many levels. I hope you like it!

To get the ball rolling in this discussion folder, here's a link to an essay I wrote while creating Paths to Wholeness that summarizes resilience-enhancing strategies I've used, both personally and professionally. This is the "uncut" version of the essay that I included in the book. It begins:

Along with perseverance and a sense of purpose, an essential capacity for successfully traversing the Hero’s Journey that describes our lives is resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back. In a physical object, it is elasticity: the property a material has to return to its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed. In an ecosystem, it is the system’s capacity to withstand shocks and to rebuild itself when disturbed. In a person, it is recovering quickly from adversity.

Resilience is what lets us rebound from failure and come back from heartbreak, illness, financial disaster, and tragedy. Those who lack resilience are overcome by obstacles and tend to give up in the face of hardship. Resilient people may feel the pain of defeat, but they don’t let it keep them down.

Resilience in materials is intrinsic, but in people it is a dynamic quality. Like a muscle, it can be damaged by stressors greater than the “system” can withstand and it can atrophy if neglected. But it can also be strengthened by exercise.

Here's a link to the complete essay, including the images:

http://www.davidbookbinder.com/photob...


Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder

Although it was ten years or so between the time I bought Eugene Gendlin's Focusing and when I actually began to use this technique in my personal life and my therapy practice, in many ways it is now at the heart of both. In the late 60s and early 70s, Gendlin teamed up with pioneer psychologist Carl Rogers to try to figure out why some people seemed to get better with therapy while others did not. After screening for all the factors one might suspect made the difference - therapeutic training and approach, experience, types of problems clients came in with, demographics, etc. - it turned out that the dominant factor was something clients either came into therapy doing (and improved) or didn't do (and didn't improve). Gendlin realized that this factor was a natural human quality, and he created this book, and many others, to help those of us who didn't natively do it learn how.

I have practiced Focusing for many years, and I have taught it to a wide variety of clients so they can do it themselves. Easier to do than to explain, Gendlin's book nevertheless does an excellent job of summarizing the rationale behind it, the technique itself, and what to do if things don't seem to be working.

Just saw this on the New York Times "Books" page, an interview with Obama by Michiko Kakutani, the chief book critic for the Times. It's an interesting, candid look into what books have meant to him.

Here's a snippit:

That period in New York, where you were intensely reading.

I was hermetic — it really is true. I had one plate, one towel, and I’d buy clothes from thrift shops. And I was very intense, and sort of humorless. But it reintroduced me to the power of words as a way to figure out who you are and what you think, and what you believe, and what’s important, and to sort through and interpret this swirl of events that is happening around you every minute.

And here's the piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/bo...

- David

Thanks for the reference. Rico's book was 1983, Elbow's was 1974, but both were innovators. I'll add to the list when I have a chance. There were others whose books also shook up writing, in a good way.

Just noticed the link to your book doesn't work. Suggest you re-enter it, and also post it on the Bookshelf for the group.

Nice to know that, at least in this respect, techniques taught in high school have changed. And to see how these life threads come together.

Thanks!

Thanks. I think I understand. Is it also possible for Citta to not arise in another place in this life, but instead to be free from rebirths after reaching a fully awakened state? Isn't that what nirvana is?

Hi, Gina. Welcome to the group!

Thanks for this interesting perspective on near-death experiences. A couple years after I had mine, I ran across an article in a Buddhist magazine which described an interpretation similar to what you are describing here.

It's been more than 20 years since I read it, but my recollection is that in that branch of Buddhism, the belief is that first the body separates from both the ordinary consciousness and what you are calling Sukshama-Kaya (I think they called it spirit), and then the consciousness separates from the spirit, and then only the spirit remains, and may either choose to inhabit or be tempted back to inhabiting another body or may go on to the non-material realm. Again, my recollection is vague, but is that somewhat similar to what you are describing?

The description I read back then strongly resonated with my own near-death experience, in which initially I was completely separated from my own history - I was essentially just consciousness, with no sense of being a human being, having a history, or ever having been a human being. Then I encountered a figure which I sensed had been there before this consciousness and would continue beyond it.

There's more on this in my book, but these phases of separation you describe resonate with what I experienced then.

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Hi, Wayne. Glad to have you on board!

David

Welcome to the group. Looking forward to hearing more.

I haven't read that one. Thanks for telling us about it! I'd like to see that more personal, vulnerable side of his life, as well as delve more deeply into some of the sutras. We're reading his introduction to Buddhism in my local sangha, and this sounds like a natural next book from him.

Hi, Courtney. Welcome to the group! Your description of graduate school sounded a lot like mine -- so much to do in only so much time, but almost all of it worthwhile, particularly the work with clients. Some of my sessions with clients in my first internship are still as vivid to me as sessions I've had this week.