Lifescape

The best self-help involves building a wellbeing practice that is integrated and which recognises that all areas of our life, experience and knowledge need to be included. I’ve spent much of the last few years investigating and working with these themes through my reading, therapeutic work and practice. My wish has been to develop – and to communicate -  a straightforward and clean integration of what it means to experience ‘wellbeing’ and what it takes to get there.

And yet there are so many ideas and frameworks out there – psychological, spiritual and cultural – that it is hard to make sense of them. The self-help industry churns out books, DVDs and courses that promise to combine spiritual enlightenment with material success and riches. Authors promise the secret of wellbeing through spirit guides, angels, alternative therapies, questionable speculations on quantum physics, a conscious universe and ancient wisdoms and insights. Belief and individual experience are given the status of ‘truths’ and regarded as the equivalent of science, which is regarded as just another ‘way of seeing’ the world. Continue Reading »

Make a shadow

Want a shadow?
Take five breaths and make a shadow.
Conjure it, speak of it, make of it a dedication:
I knew my soul would live like this! -
A realisation, a revelation!

Give something of yourself to yourself,
Then give yourself to someone else, and
In the space that will emerge, talk of love,
And touch another, gently too;
Remember these are shadows you are talking of.

Long shades fall as a bright day ends,
Yet if we are at peace, they seem
Like ancient, dark, remembered friends.
Want a shadow?
Take this life and make a shadow (ref)

 This is not, writes Alice Walker, “a time to live without a practice. It is a time when all of us will need the most faithful self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion”.(ref)

My practices are poetry, conversation and a sense of meditative presence. My ‘enthusiasm’ is based on a rational, materialist knowledge (not belief) in what we now know through science (as opposed to what was known and believed in centuries past). The ‘god’ I am filled with is a flow of spirit into the words I write. In future decades and centuries, more will be known (and therefore science will evolve) but the poetic voice that emerges from the human soul will still be seeking ways of practising.

 For me, it is practice that is important, rather than any belief – in fact belief often gets in the way of a sense of fulfilment in our lives. Knowledge is good – albeit a necessarily incomplete portion of our human experience – and comes from evidence that is accumulated and adjusted over time. Continue Reading »

Dear friends

As I write, summer seems to have come, gone – and come again. In May, during that glorious spell, I, like many others, started to feel lifted in some way. We take it for granted sometimes that our moods are affected by so many things – the weather included, but it’s not often acknowledged that these subtle relationships between our bodies, minds and environment can have a profound effect on our health. In this letter I highlight a book, champion some beautiful new ambient music and reflect on the potential for joy and healing in our world and in the awareness and sensitivity of the ‘fey’ child inside us all.

Recently I read a simple and wonderful book by psychiatrist, Dr David Servan-Schreiber, entitled ‘Healing with Freud or Prozac’. Actually the book isn’t anti-therapy or anti-anti-depressants, but highlights the recent evidence showing that the body and emotional brain are a lot better at ‘self-healing’ than was previously thought. Stress, anxiety and depression are social, environmental and biological phenomena, he tells us, and with awareness and insight – drawn from what he calls  the new ‘emotion medicine’ – we can begin to heal ourselves.

Joy and healing are available to us in other ways. Most of us know the powerful and profound effects of music, poetry and art on the spirit and the soul, and one of the things that we seem to have lost in our culture is a sense of the innocence of creativity. When the Romantic poets were writing, their poems were paeans to landscapes and ideals – to ‘utopia’. As we have lost this idealism, so this has become deeply damaging for our culture, for us as individuals and for the planet. Continue Reading »

In this post: reflections on happiness, but first, news of the launch of the new creative thorp website where you can browse and buy stunning art and poetry gifts. If you’ve been to the website before, then you’ll find it cleaner, quicker and easier to use. I hope you’ll enjoy browsing and consider subscribing to creative thorp via. the new subscription page.

A GROWN UP KIND OF HAPPINESS?

“Happiness”, writes Matthieu Ricard, “is the result of inner maturity. It depends on us alone and requires patient work carried out from day to day” (ref).

It has struck me lately how true this is for many of us; that achieving happiness is a grown-up, lifelong process rather than a permanent state; a way through to something intrinsic in us, rather than just a positive response to favourable or unfavourable circumstances.

Of course childhood is – for the fortunate child – a glorious place to be, and it is her very immaturity that leads to happiness: the ways in which she follows her needs and desires so closely, and finds delight in the simplest, stupidest things. Happiness, for the child, can be there because there is no requirement (for the fortunate child) for her to be anything else but immature. But then when immaturity lingers, it confuses the adolescent and begins to make looming adulthood seem a journey into the unknown. Continue Reading »

Outside my window, the hoar frost has settled on a grey, damp, winter townscape and it won’t lift, I think, for some days. This day is bleak and chilled, with nothing much to recommend it; people shuffle about in coats and scarves never quite feeling warm enough. This is how it feels for many of us at the start of 2009: we live in a frozen, financial world; war seems, once again, to be spluttering into life in Gaza; people fear for the future.

However as we enter this New Year, I have found myself to be on the hopeful side of the street. I am a little surprised by this, and thankful to both the people who love and sustain me. I am also a little grateful to myself for being able to experience the moments of joy and wholeness that give me this sense of perspective on my world. For the time being, at least, it seems possible to hope, to see through to my creative self and to live with some sense of space and silence. Continue Reading »

It’s a while since the last Lifescape letter, but I’ve been involved in some interesting and exciting projects, including one that is turning out to be a deep, multifaceted programme of staff development at Cranfield University. After an initial phase of training on stress and wellbeing for all managers in the University during 2007, a survey was undertaken in May of this year – and the organisation is now is the process of planning the next stage – which has the potential to be really transformational in terms of how people experience their working life. Watch this space – or if you’re interested in talking further about this work, and how a similar programme could be supported in your own organisation, please do get in touch.

Please also check out my other website and projects: creativethorp.com and editionspoetry.wordpress.com for news of other activities – including the publication on my editions series of poetry pamphlets. You can also download two pdf. flyer brochures on talks, workshops and consultancy support I can offer – wellbeing with a difference and development with a difference.

SABOTAGE!

A few weeks ago, during a quiet and rainy weekend in Pembrokeshire, I came up with the central idea for some writing I’ve wanted to do for some time. This was exciting and inspirational for me – and reminded me of what a wise colleague once said to me a few years back when I was struggling with a faltering writing project. He said “I think this book is your spiritual challenge” – or words to that effect – and I think he was right, though maybe not about that particular project. What was true, and what I think he intuitively meant, was that writing MY book (whenever and whatever it may be) is part of my own calling. In a sense, this is the task we all have throughout our life – to unveil or reveal the calling that has always been inside us. In a sense – we all have to write our own ‘book’. Continue Reading »

A lot of time, this spring and summer, has been taken up with endings and new beginnings. Finishing my MSc in Psychotherapy was one (long overdue) ending. The publication of my new editions poetry series and the growth of my new venture, creative thorp, with my wife Mary, both felt very much like beginnings. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about experience and about the tension between rational and enlightened experience. Here’s the beginnings of a summer reflection….

THE MOMENT IS NOW

In his wonderful ‘Lectures on Physics’, latter-day renaissance man Richard Feynmann wrote – “We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that is not science”. He was aware that science is a human activity and that science – or sciences – can divide the universe into parts, rather than experiencing it as a whole.

For many people over the centuries there has been a divide between materialistic science and spiritual experience (historically aka religion), and the debate rages even now as the materialists (Dawkins, Hitchens et al) are attacked both traditional theologists (perhaps understandably) but also by a new breed of ‘enlightened’ and ‘awakened’ thinkers and practitioners. I’ve written about what I see as the muddled thinking of those in the new-age community who want to use the language of science to explain their own versions of reality which are, often, experiential and speculatory. Now there’s nothing wrong with experience – I think, in fact that its a good thing, but like Feynmann might have said “there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not science”.

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“The basic root of happiness lies in our minds; outer circumstances are nothing more than adverse or favourable”
Matthieu Ricard, (2000).

I’m beginning to wonder whether managing stress, standards, risk assessment and the promotion of passive version of wellbeing run the danger of taking the life and energy out of our lives and workplaces. So rather than talking about managing stress or even promoting staff wellbeing, maybe we should start talking about joy at work? That might shake things up a bit, because if we open ourselves up to joy, then we inevitably open ourselves to more negative emotions too! For as the Buddhist poet and teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, wrote: “One who strives for Enlightenment must expect to encounter terrible obstacles: anger, desire, mental confusion, pride and jealously”, (don’t worry, I’m not going for Enlightenment at work just yet, but don’t let me stop you trying!).

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On November 10th I’ll be delivering an all day creative workshop entitled “a way of being free” . The workshop is part of Nant y Coy Art’s programme of events, exhibitions and activities. See their website at www.nantycoy.com for further details and to book a place on the day-long workshop for only £15. You can also download a publicity sheet for the event by clicking here: A way of being free. The article below is a ‘work in progress’, based around this theme.

“The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene.” Dennis Potter, April 1994

In one of the recent Guardian series of Great Interviews of the twentieth century series there’s an extract from Dennis Potter’s interview with Melvyn Bragg in April 1994. That, in itself, is a frightening thing: not only how quickly those years have gone by; but also that its taken me 13 more years since first seeing and being inspired by the interview to realise how much potential significance it had for our psychological, political and intellectual freedom.

One the one hand, Potter, dying, says what he pleases – eloquent and rapier-like – enjoying targeting our political and intellectual culture in general and individuals like Rupert Murdoch in particular. And on the other hand, freed of any sort of constraint within himself (with no sense of himself in the future), Potter is able to be utterly free in the present. And that, in short, is the ultimate freedom for any individual – to be able to be so much in the present that we not only notice what is around us, but we are freed of any hopes or fears about what the consequences of this moment might be in some kind of projected version of ourselves.

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“If self is a location, so is love:

Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,

Options, obstinacies, dug heels and distance,

Here and there and now and then, a stance”.

(From: The Aerodrome by Seamus Heaney, in District and Circle, 2006).

Lifescape has been going for over two years, and more and more I’ve been intrigued by the way in which the ’self’ is mediated by love. Not love that happens by chance, but love that is believed in and experienced; and THAT is dependent on a whole host of things – our history, our belief in ourselves and the extent to which we are able to open ourselves out to the world – and to others. As Eric Fromm wrote fifty years ago: “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”!

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