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

David’s comments from the Paths to Wholeness group.

My motorcycle learning didn't stop with Pirsig's book and that 1974 trip, although it took a long time to resume. Here's one of two essays from my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas that continues the process begun in that long-ago time.

Chapter 37. PATIENCE>
Patience is also a form of action.
- Auguste Rodin

PATIENCE: PRACTICE
Motorcycle maintenance has always been an important part of riding for me. Knowing more than just the basics gives me confidence that I can get the bike going if it breaks down on the highway, and it also helps me feel connected to the machine.

I used to be good at it. Back in the mid ’70s, on a long road trip, I seized a piston climbing a steep hill in Ohio. I managed to break it free, limp to Chicago, and drag the bike into a friend’s basement. There, with only the tools in my tool kit and a few from a borrowed tool box, I disassembled the engine. Then I got the cylinder bored out, replaced the damaged piston with a larger one, and rode the bike another thousand miles home.

When I started riding again after a very long hiatus, I soon found I’d forgotten most of what I’d known about motorcycle maintenance. The learning curve for returning to riding was steep, but I climbed it in four days. The curve for motorcycle maintenance, however, has been much tougher to surmount. Some of what I once knew is coming back, but I still have a long way to go.

One of my main obstacles to becoming proficient at motorcycle maintenance has been lack of patience. I took a leap forward, however, when I watched how my engineer brother, Mark, approaches this task.

Mark and I converge on Syracuse in the late spring and early fall to visit our mother and to ride together with my brother Paul. On one such trip, Mark, who is not only a mechanical engineer but also a motorcycle safety instructor, volunteered to help me adjust my motorcycle engine’s valves.
My bike is an old single-cylinder design and its four valves need adjusting every 5,000 miles. When I looked up the procedure in the repair manual, accessing the valves seemed straightforward, but manipulating a feeler gauge, a wrench, and a screw driver in the cramped space available felt too daunting for me even to attempt. But it was not daunting to Mark, who has an engineer’s confidence that if one man can design a piece of machinery, another can maintain it.

His first try at adjustment was unsuccessful. He couldn’t even get the feeler gauge in place. When that happened, I felt my body tense up and my jaw tighten – I was 350 miles from home and the bike was now unrideable. But instead of panicking like me, Mark stepped away from the machine, seemed to reset himself emotionally, and reflected on what he’d learned from this attempt. Then he came at it again, bending the feeler gauge so it more easily reached the gap. That was better, but there was a problem with the adjustment nut. So he stepped back again, reset himself, and again reflected on what he had learned. On the third try, he got it, and he quickly adjusted the remaining valves using the technique he’d devised.

Riding back from Syracuse on my freshly tuned bike, I thought about my brother’s approach: Make an attempt, and if it doesn’t succeed, reset yourself, incorporate what you learned, and try again. Then rinse, lather, and repeat as needed. This methodology, I realized, epitomized patience.
Patience applies to much more than working on mechanical devices. Without patience, qualities such as forgiveness, resilience, and opportunity are all difficult, if not impossible, to realize. Patience with ourselves and others allows us to forgive. Patience with loss permits us, little by little, to overcome it. Patience with opportunity helps us both to see it when it arrives and, when it does not, to be open to it in the future.

Psychotherapy, too, is a patience practice. Week after week, clients struggle with the same issues, and it would be easy for both me and the client to throw up our hands in frustration. But instead, we go down a path of potential healing together, continue along it as far as seems helpful, and when we hit a block, we reset, reevaluate, and then start down another.

Opportunities for developing patience present themselves every day. Even small, regular tasks can be our teachers: cleaning the bathroom, washing the dishes, dealing with traffic on the commute to work. Lessons learned from approaching these tasks in a patient, mindful way can transfer to our more formidable challenges.

When I was a college student, the phrase “Don’t push the river, it flows by itself” became a meme. At the time, I thought it was synonymous with “Go with the flow.” But now I see it as encouraging patience. Whether that river is the congested highway at rush hour or the temporal currents that draw us toward the ends of our lives, we don’t need to push it. With patience, we can let it carry us along.

Sitting in front of me on my desk right now is the copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I bought in August, 1974, and carried with me on my own motorcycle trip from Buffalo, out to Indiana, down to Baltimore, and finally up to New York City, where I stayed for 6 years. I was a year out of college, still trying to figure out what to do when I "grew up," and Pirsig's book came out shortly before I started my own trip. Though at the time it seemed clichéd to take such a book on a motorcycle trip, and it was one more heavy thing to add to the already overstuffed pack strapped behind me on my little Yamaha 200, it turned out to be exactly the right thing to guide my inner journey, and even helped me diagnose and repair a motorcycle issue that led to my seizing a piston in Ohio.

It's been 42 years since I read this book, and when I flip through it and see the sentences I underlined I'm sometimes puzzled by those choices, but it still leaves a feeling in my chest that is an almost indescribable sense of longing, wonder, excitement, and calm. And I can't say many other books have had as lingering an effect, so this one makes the "Books that have inspired me" list.

Indeed it is a damn funky idea. And sometimes, that's how it works out, through a process that, these days, is called posttraumatic growth, as defined here: https://ptgi.uncc.edu/what-is-ptg/

But what does not kill you does not always make you stronger. I have seen people triumph in amazing ways over their trauma (for example, see Jon Morrow's story), and I have also seen people so shattered by it that they never recover. We mostly hear about the triumphs but as a therapist I see a wider variety of effects.

The attitude that seems to help more than any other is to look for the opportunity in the difficulty, to find - as a friend of mine puts it - the AFGO (Another F**king Growth Opportunity).

As journalist Jimmy Breslin put it, if you don't blow your own horn, nobody else will, so here are descriptions of my recently released book, eBooks, and coloring book for adults:

Paths to Wholeness books. In my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas, I distilled the best of what I’ve learned as an artist, writer, and psychotherapist into a unique blend of Flower Mandala images and related essays on 52 fundamental aspects of human experience. Here are links to the print and eBook editions:
Print edition: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0984699406
Kindle eBook: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAAFU3S
iBooks eBook: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id118...
Book page: http://transformationspress.org/paths...

I also created a free, shortened eBook version that includes, among eight others, a chapter on the near-death experience that led me to becoming a psychotherapist:
Kindle eBook: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1NV2MA
iBooks eBook: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/paths...

52 (more) Flower Mandalas coloring book. In my therapy practice, I've come to see that coloring is more than a fad or a diversion. It can also be a mindful activity for many people who might be unwilling to try meditation. I collaborated with artist Mary O'Malley (http://maryomalleyart.com) to create a new Flower Mandalas coloring book, 52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book. That's available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0984699422

Reviews appreciated. Besides being a self-publisher, I'm now also the marketing department, something quite foreign to me. If you read any of these books and feel inclined to leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads, that would be very helpful in getting them out into the world, where I hope they can do some good.

It's hard to want to kill an old friend who so generously plugs my personality -- and anyway, I don't recommend a near-death experience as a voluntary path to wholeness. It may have launched me on a new path, but there are gentler ways to do that!

You can test your HSP-ness here: http://hsperson.com/test/

It's a rough screen, but in my therapy practice I have found that people who seem to show the characteristics score very high on the test. For instance, I scored 26 out of 27.

As for being an HSP, it seems to be a hard-wired trait. HSPs are born, not made. The Harvard/U. Toronto researchers found that it existed in other primates, too. The key seems to be what they called a "lowered threshold of disinhibition" -- unconsciously letting more stimuli reach the conscious level than the bulk of the population does. Hypervigilance, emotional sensitivity, sensitivity to the arts, and other characteristics typical of an HSP show up in many people who are not, technically, HSPs.

Aron's book The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You is one I wish had been written decades ago. It helped me understand that I'm a “highly sensitive person” – someone who takes in, on both a sensory and emotional level, more than most people do. There are a lot of us – some 20% of the population, according to Aron, a figure validated by an independent study done by Harvard and the University of Toronto a few years after Aron's book was published. Being "highly sensitive" is a blessing and a curse: We can’t screen much out, so all kinds of things bother us that don't bother most people, but we also have more data available at a conscious level, and sometimes we can do things with that data that people who automatically screen out more can't.

The simple screen for this type of sensitivity on Aron's website hsperson.com, and her practical advice for how to cope with this characteristic, are uniquely valuable resources for those of us who are highly sensitive, and for those in close relationship with us.

It's been quite a while since I read it, but a few things that stand out are the need for HSPs to have down time after being in a stimulating environment; the need for non-HSPs to understand that HSPs really do experience things more intensely than they do; and the need for HSPs to realize that others are probably not being rude or inconsiderate, they simply may not be connecting the dots that the HSPs think are obvious because they've automatically screened them out as not significant.

David

Christine,

I'm sorry that you have had to endure so much suffering, and that it's been compounded by an internal critic. For what it's worth, I began the process of becoming a therapist in a state of physical and emotional pain, isolation, and a sense of failure on many levels. Becoming a therapist, and continuing to put on my best self every day to be there for my clients, has been an integrating and rejuvenating experience, despite the demands on my time and emotions it also places.

I think there's something true about wounded healers being the best healers because they know suffering, and in the process of healing others, also healing themselves. I hope that this is how it works out for you, too.

David

I understand what you are saying about the validation of encountering someone who knows/sees/hears/says something that articulates the unarticulated in us - gets it just so. But I can't help seeing that you are also, I think, no slouch in the articulation department. Nicely put. Very nicely!

David

Welcome to the group, Christine, and thanks for your story. For what it's worth, becoming a therapist (which I did beginning at age 51) was an integrating experience that brought together the pieces I'd fragmented into following a near-death experience and associated trauma. 15 years later, it still forces/encourages me to inhabit my best self, which remains a useful practice.

I'd like the group to be a way for all of us to share what we know, what we've been through, what brought us to where we are, and what might help us get to where we can become. When I was a college student (in several incarnations), conversations where something was created that none of us could have gotten to ourselves happened fairly frequently, especially in English classes, or very late at night. In discussions fed by literature and the Vietnam War, were jumping off from a pretty high place, and sometimes, for a little bit, learned to fly.

I'm hoping some of that happens here.

David

James Agee and Walker Evans' book of lyrical prose and hard-edged images Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was one of three books I brought with me when I moved to NYC in 1974, and one of a short list that have a major influence on me as a young writer back then. This was the first book I'd encountered that looked and felt deeply about a group of people largely ignored by the rest of the country, and it directly influenced my own several-year project photographing and interviewing the people I encountered living or working the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I have yet to encounter anything that quite matches it in its powerful synergy of prose and photographs.

Welcome to the group, Ashley. I added your book to my "Want to Read" list and look forward to reading it. I work with many clients who have anxiety and depression, and I suspect they would find it helpful.

Art and Fear is the most concise and friendly companion to anyone trying to define themselves as an artist that I have so far encountered.

I grew up in a home where guilt was a kind of spiritual currency. When I Say No, I Feel Guilty changed all that.

This is the book I most often take off my shelf and show to clients. Even if all you learn from it is the "Broken record" technique and to accept that his "Assertiveness Bill of Rights" applies to you, it can change your life for the better.

Pressfield's concise assault on Resistance and his distinction between the professional and the amateur artist helped me break through some substantial blocks along the way to creating my book 'Paths to Wholeness.' Highly recommended.

I read Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children 22 years ago, shortly after I had my own near-death experience and was trying to make sense of the phenomenon. This book, along with Raymond Moody's Life After Life, helped me see that although the experiences near-death experiencers have are shaped by their spiritual and cultural beliefs, there are some common denominators that recur even with young children.

Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, which I first encountered in 1974, changed the way I thought about writing and freed me from one of my chief impediments: the idea that I had to work out in my head, or in an outline, what I wanted to say before I wrote anything down. By introducing the concept of freewriting, Elbow made it possible to start anywhere, and trust that the process of writing without a teacher, and without editing, would be sufficient to get core ideas down, which later editing and revising could polish into something that might never have come to be, using the method drilled into me in high school and college.

I first encountered Blake's part visionary / part comic / part poetry / part etching long poem in 1969, in an English class, while an Engineering student at Cornell University. I had grown up a kid scientist, and my hope was that I'd become a NASA engineer. I was also very much in my head and not so much in my body, in the world of logic and not so much the world of emotion. Blake's poem convince me I had to change all that or I'd live out my days a reduced version of myself. This powerful piece reached out to me over many decades and 6000 miles and changed not only my focus (from Engineering to English major) but also set in motion a process of actualizing the more suppressed parts of myself, a lifelong activity that began then and there. Thank you, Mr. Blake!

- David

I read Being Peace about 20 years ago, and then again a couple of years ago. It was the first book by the Buddhist teacher and writer for me, and it is, I think, a seminal work, capturing in one short volume the essence of what he would go on to explicate in his many books since this one. The first time I read this book, I had never heard of Thich Nhat Hanh and was attracted to the title. I read it in a couple of sittings. The second time through, I read the book in short bursts, one per week, in the company of other people who also follow Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings. It took several months, and it was a more profound experience because each short segment has layers of meaning and feeling that take time to settle into the soul. Highly recommended as a first place to meet this wise teacher's work.

I first encountered Tales of the Dervishes in 1970 in what officially was an English Composition class but was really a class in, for me, radically different ways of thinking. Among the texts was this book, my first introduction to Eastern religion, a collection of Sufi teaching stories. The stories are a form of parable, but intended to be understood differently according to the ability of the listener/reader. Some of them I still vividly recall and have used in conversations with friends and therapy clients. I went on to study with a Sufi guide for a while, and learned from him a Sufi meditation practice aimed at increasing intuition and creativity that seemed to open up a kind of 6th sense while I was doing it daily. Remarkable stuff. I've since migrated to Buddhist practices, but I continue to find the Sufi teachings and practices intriguing, and for me they started here.

Yes, a remarkable guy. I had been vaguely following some of his Smartblogger emails, but I knew nothing about him until he started this project. I have many clients who have had some kind of misfortune that knocked them flat. Jon's story and strategies may inspire them.