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.

Of course, belief is not the equivalent of tested, validated knowledge. And science is not ‘just another way of seeing’, but the best way we have of examining and testing our shared knowledge of the physical world and of our material selves. However spiritual ideas and frameworks have their place – indeed historically they provided the best ways available at the time of explaining the unexplained, and have given rise to beneficial practices such as meditation and systems of ethics. Meditative practice and ethical systems, however, do not require belief to sustain them, and there are other forms of historical practice – such as philosophical inquiry – that have long been built upon humanist, secular assumptions.

Ken Wilber’s work on integral practice does include a spiritual line of development (alongside a range of others), but recognises that there are a number of dimensions to human experience and community that , if integrated, can lead to a full and authentic experience of human life. His life’s work in researching and making sense of the full range of what he calls human growth technologies shows us that, in any belief system or way of thinking, there are core practices that contribute to the wellbeing of individuals, groups, cultures and societies.

Even a predominantly secular, rationalist approach to wellbeing can learn a lot from Wilber’s project. If we are clear about the differences between collectively validated knowledge and individual experience, and between belief and metaphor, then it is possible build a wellbeing practice which has integrity and soul without necessarily being drawn into the mixed up world of faith without reason.

The Integral Life project, inspired by Wilber’s ideas, sets out a wide range of ideas for individuals to develop an individual practice that can enhance wellbeing, integrity and happiness. I’ve adapted some first steps from Wilber’s ‘Integral Operating System‘ ) available free to download HERE) to get you started:

STEP 1 : Scan your current practices – what are you already doing that supports your wellbeing, and how do these activities relate to your experience as a whole person living in the world?
STEP 2 : Identify imbalances and gaps – what are the areas which need to be developed further or are missing from your life at the moment? For example you might be eating a healthy diet and doing some yoga exercise, but not doing much aerobic exercise, or working on changing negative aspects of your thinking and emotions.
STEP 3 : Evaluate your commitment – be realistic and prepared to put time and effort in. There is no quick-fix – nor a ‘change your life in seven days’ approach, but self help that takes a lifetime. Such an approach involves the building of good sustainable habits and skills that have the potential to support your wellbeing for the rest of your life.
STEP 4 – Choose your tools and practices – find techniques and tools that you want or need to use now, depending the first three stages above. Some of these might involve the consolidation of existing practices; others might be new approaches that fill a gap or balance up your life in some way.
STEP 5 – Practice diligently on your own and with others – As Wilber urges: “train with full engagement”. It is important to keep practices going so they don’t become temporary positive changes which aren’t sustained. Often we can do this best if we seek out a supportive community of people who can help us with this. Wilber urges having several mentors or teachers in your support network. This could be done one-to-one, in a group or through an online forum or email relationship.

If you’d like some help with any of these ideas, then why not contact me? I can provide psychotherapy, mentoring, training or coaching at a reasonable cost – short or long term and for individual or groups.

Contact: stevethorp@lifescape.org.uk or call 07949553029.

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.

 Joy and spirit (also good) come from subjective experience and from disciplined, connecting practice. But is important to assert that one can feel wonder without belief, feel connected without belief, and we can love and have morality without belief. If someone else wants to get some comfort from the belief in a god or a supernatural soul then, at an experiential level, then so be it. But belief isn’t a necessary pre-requisite to goodness or to happiness. And believing something doesn’t make it true.

 The experience of human wholeness comes from a clear recognition of the boundaries between our inner and outer worlds and between our character strengths and our shadow. It comes from recognising the difference between the enlightenment that comes from knowing, and that which comes from pinning our hopes on some kind of force outside ourselves – either a traditional all powerful deity, or a conscious universe drawn from pseudo-scientific speculation. The grown up psychological position has always been one of facing up to the challenge that new knowledge and self knowledge presents us with – to be humble, to surrender to the realities of our existence.

 So this is a plea for both spirit and science. Science tells us that spirit comes from within – trading in, as Daniel Dennett puts it, “a supernatural soul for a natural soul”  (ref). I can deal with that, it makes life no less wonderful, no less joyful and no less moral. And as the physicist, Richard Feynman wrote over 45 years ago: “we must…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 it is not a science (ref).

 When we love someone (or even if we love a god) then this is not a bad thing – it will often be (but not necessarily always) a very, very good thing. However love (and belief) are always subjective and often can be blind, whereas what we know through accumulated evidence is not – although it may be incomplete and supplanted and supplemented over time.

 What is important is that our practices, our beliefs and the way we use our knowledge are aligned with our world and the other life-forms that share it with us. For, as Alice Walker writes: “We will be doubly bereft without some sort of practice that connects us, in a caring way, to what begins to feel like a dissolving world” (ref).

 It’s up to us now. If we want joy, we take it from our life, own up to our shadows and give ourselves to the world: “Want a shadow? Take this life and make a shadow”

A gift of Life

 The poem above comes from a brand new poetry collection entitled Life. Here’s an extract from the introduction:

“This project emerged when Steve Thorp met artist Kim Major-George at an art and design event in 2009. Immediately something sparked and this collection of poetry is the result. Life was written and compiled in celebration of Kim’s Age of Enlightenment sculptures and her Life of Buddha exhibition UK tour in 2009 and 2010.

 Kim Major-George is usually known for her distinctive spiritual collagraphs. In 2009 she created three large sculptured panels of the prophet Buddha. These powerful images are created using layer upon layer of paper covered with gesso and finally painted with acrylic.

 This pamphlet by Steve Thorp is in two parts. The first, Questing, comprises poems reflecting on the dilemmas of our existence, the questions we ask and the places we sometimes turn. Part two, Wisdoms, has a surer intent. Inspired by small pieces of wisdom from Buddhist teachers, psychotherapists, surfers, poets and others, Wisdoms explores the steps we can make to embody ourselves in the world, rather than, more simply, just being a follower”.

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.

Our disconnection from ourselves, each other and from the earth around us is often deeply painful to us. Many of those who come to talk in therapy seem to be most aware of this pain and it seems as if they are grieving for something deeply important to the human soul. There is, perhaps, a lost archetype of childhood in this sense of loss, remembered by us all, but most of all by the faery children – those who seem most connected with the magic in the world, and who are always stirring, rebelling against socialised norms and economic and political cynicism and greed; always trying to cross the veil between this world and the imagined. These wise, childish voices are our conscience – they carry the sadness of the world and also the knowledge of its potential for simple joy – and something else: the promise of discovering something of our true selves free of the constraints and denials we have constructed around our lives as we grow into adulthood.

So there is hope in rediscovering the simple, everyday magic of our lives and surroundings. The relatively new field of eco-therapy recognises this, building on the healing power of simply being in the world by using “the natural environment to enable us to make sense of our inner emotions and life experiences”. And though we may have lost much of the countryside that the Romantic poets were writing about, there are still whole swathes of beautiful landscape in the UK and beyond. With presence and wonder, even a small backyard or garden can become a paradise that offers us the promise of healing.

In one such small corner – in the idyllic valley of Hope Bagot in Shropshire – was born Utopia XO – an ambient music project which is the brainchild of Dave Hesketh. The recently released album, the Light, is a luminous and beautiful piece of music and one that is entirely without cynicism. Dave’s music reminds us is that even in the midst of an industrialised, commercial culture, we haven’t lost the natural beauty of the world. In his little valley, and in the hills and coastlines of Pembrokeshire where I spend as much time as I can, there still lies the promise of joy and healing for ourselves and our world. People like Dave, and the faery children who keep innocence alive can, perhaps keep for us the hopes and promises of Utopia – even in our damaged and cynical world that seems to breed so much despair.

You can read a short ‘work in progress’ article on the faery child archetype by clicking HERE, and you find out more about the fascinating UtopiaXO project  at: http://viewutopia.com/

So here’s to a new movement for innocence, joy and utopia!

Love as always

Steve

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.

Maybe it is not surprising that many of us find it difficult to grow up and and perhaps we cannot be wholly blamed for our holding on to our lingering immaturities. Growing up is confusing and there are few rituals of initiation remaining that help us pass from one stage of our lives to another. We are urged, on the one hand, to listen to our ‘inner child’, and on the other to take our responsibilities seriously. And the carrot of quick-fix success and happiness is dangled before us, as numerous 20 and 30-something celebrities bring out their autobiographies, as if they have access to a secret that the rest of us have somehow missed.

There is no quick fix, and no secret. Some wisdom only comes with experience, part of which tells us that being happy throughout a life is never guaranteed – for there are far too many variables! This wisdom says that all we can hope for is to negotiate our path with a growing degree of maturity, openness and presence. When I bring these qualities to my own life, I notice that there are moments of joy waiting for me everywhere and anywhere, and at other times it is the lingering presence of my immature, needy, childish self that gets in the way of my experiencing them.

We might, therefore, regard the inner-child, with all his clinging to need and impulse, as being an obstacle to the kind of deep, sustainable happiness that we all desire. I know of myself that it is when I am inwardly immature that I find it difficult to touch joy. Somehow, at these times, a sullen blanket of bruised entitlement and “it’s not fair” covers my world and conceals its potential. And I also sometimes feel put in my place (as a child might) and the familiar, habitual insecurities move me away from happiness and towards some kind of historical need for reassurance.

By all means let us hold onto our playfulness, spontaneity and attachments – but let us also not mistake childish buffoonery or the safety of habit for happiness. We all know the archetype of the clown with the painted smile, and our TV screens are filled daily with outwardly happy people who, behind the scenes, are desperately trying to fill themselves up with the transient pseudo-happiness of sex, consumption and whatever is their drug of choice. At the same time, others succumb to their attachments and find a place to belong (or hide), which, however values-based (whether conventional or rebellious) at the outset, becomes fixed in ways that prevent them from growing and changing as they have the potential to do.

Happiness -  joy – is a contradictory thing anyway. Some of the psychotherapy clients I see who are often profoundly unhappy also carry an enormous capacity for joy and creativity. They seem somehow OPEN to the world in a way that others are not, and while this leads as much to pain and sorrow as it does to joy – they sometimes have the magical capacity to reveal the beauty in the world to others in surprising and joyful ways.

It requires strength, honesty, courage and a sense of great resilience and maturity to live with this contradiction. Nevertheless, I have a sneaking suspicion that, in the long run, many of these people – undoubtedly deeply depressed  for much of their time on earth – often live lives that are profound and fulfilled. They ask big questions and are somehow not as afraid of despair as the rest of us; for them, after all, it is a familiar, if unwelcome, companion.

Perhaps these were the serious children – the boys and girls whose inner-maturity was there from the start. Emotionally and spiritually precocious they were always tuned into the pain of the world – perhaps too much so for their own wellbeing. It is perhaps their inner children who can teach us something important about growing up with joy. We should, I think, honour them, as the soul-guides of our age, who, if we listen carefully, can teach us not just lessons of happiness, but how to live.

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.

One of the things that characterises hopelessness, for many, is the inner clamour and conflict about how they feel they should be in the world. Another is some kind of layering of watchful, anxious need that seems to settle on our lives (a little like the hoar frost), muffling passion and calling and making our deeper dreams and wishes appear opaque, obscure or even unattainable. This wanting and despair seems to emerge from the myths of our culture that tell us how we should live our lives – the social and religious injunctions that give a kind of twisted meaning to what, otherwise, has the potential to be wonderful, wise and beautiful – if only we can allow and notice it.

We know, from the integration of the wisdom of countless teachers and writers from, literature, science, religion and beyond, that joy – or wholeness – doesn’t depend on what we have learned or been told we are supposed to be doing, achieving or needing, but on some simple, wholesome things: good work, meaning, love, a sense of presence – and woven through it all, an emerging, renewing sense of a ‘soul’ being made. These elements, together with a trust in our own inner direction and growth can make all the difference.

Of course, on other days, doubt, fear, anger, ambition, pride, blame, self-doubt and hopelessness can get in the way of the sense of presence that makes all this possible. The way to experience joy and appreciate the beauty and wonder of the world is to allow our presence and attention to come through this difficult emotional terrain. Though it is a simple idea, it is a profoundly difficult piece of disciplined lifework – joy is not a permanent state – it is transient and changeable and all the more beautiful for it.

Likewise we should recognise that bleakness and despair are also transient; that joy is possible if despair is faced, not turned away from and ultimately resisted in joyful acts of activism, love and engagement with the world. One day soon the hoar frost will give way to crisp, cold, bright winter sunshine: Spring and all its promise will be in the air.

Poem of the month

Secularity

I’d like to defend emotion against the benefactor of spirit, for
Feeling as we do, we are not part of your constituency -
Nor does wonder (the best of emotions) belong to you.
Beauty, therefore, is neither barbaric nor the function of the eternal
(Though the blank, hollow-eyed version is seen regularly in bulletins).

On the park bench, meanwhile, the nominal sceptic sits in the rain,
Staring into a mazy, bloodshot sky, showing a subtle appreciation of
Osmosis and a Spartan denial of the oligarchy of faith.

So I’d like to defend random variance, quirky, stickleback foresight and
Mortality and, in doing so, fly a tattered flag, not in prayer, but in reverence
To quasars, hummingbirds, river dolphins and the microscopic generalities
That created this poem which, in wishing you well on the journey,
I’d like to dedicate to your unfolding, unnoticed, neglected soul.

Secularity is taken from editions 1 published by creative thorp and available now for purchase at £8.50 plus p & p.

Please 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.

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’.

Someone said to me in frustration the other day “why is it that some people know their calling from the start, whilst the rest of us have to keep searching or don’t even know where to look?” and  I know that this is my question too. There is a sense for me of being one of the searchers, though deep inside there were always some clues: I’ve kept writing, listening and teaching in whatever context I find myself.

 This book, this exciting, new idea IS my calling, and it is a profound spiritual challenge. One part of that challenge comes from my internal saboteur that has come on the scene again. Since that revelatory weekend, I didn’t write a word of the new project  for three weeks, concerning myself (worried myself) with petty administration, marketing and the admittedly important task on finding work so I can pay the mortgage next year. Yet every time I sat down with space to write, something got in the way.

Perhaps, in truth, for many of us our good work carries within it a surrender and a risk-taking that seems almost too fearful to contemplate. The hopeful, eager, searching child inside me sees his dream as possible at last, but the grizzled old cynic – who has seen it all before and been with me when hope has died in times past – just raises an eyebrow and reminds me that there is a real world to be lived in with bills, debts, mortgages and duties to perform. This tension around the work we need to do and the work we feel obliged to do; the conflict between these polarised psychological positions is wonderfully described by David Whyte in his book Crossing the unknown sea – and reading it again has given my hopeful child courage, and reminded me that fighting my saboteur might not be best strategy.

David Whyte writes about how, for the child, “a courageous aunt, a roguish uncle, an authentic teacher, a true friend, a scintillating character in a picture book, all hold, by their example, imaginative treasures that a child will use later when they must open their life and work once more to a sense of freedom and happiness. Years later, at a different threshold – at thirty, forty-five, fifty-five or sixty five – we suddenly remember exactly the place in our body we buried these freedoms, and marking the spot, dig deep into the ground of that memory to reclaim and live them again”. (Crossing the Unknown Sea, p160).

Perhaps the practical cynic in me has, to some extent, my welfare at heart. He is protecting me against myself until, perhaps, I am ready to meet the challenge, ready to dig down and discover my freedoms. Without making this an excuse to procrastinate, and without allowing the final act to be one of sabotage, maybe it’s OK to let things unfold. This book, the good work that was revealed to me a few weeks ago, must be allowed to grow – it cannot be forced, or force-fed.

This more humbling viewpoint, recognises that my internal saboteur is protecting me against myself, and against the grandiose belief that I am ready – that I am grown-up enough. At fifty, perhaps I should be, but should is a word of sabotage in itself. As soon as it is spoken it takes us to other places, where restrictions, injunctions and sanctions rule, and into a trap that takes us farther from our authentic self. Perhaps this great protector is waiting for me to show that I am ready for the spiritual challenge; then and only then will he let the child free to do his good work.

Good work

Poet, David Whyte’s book Crossing the unknown sea is subtitled:  work and the shaping of identity, and it gets to the heart of what good work is about and is a welcome antidote to the pseudoscientific language of much psychological writing and to the shoulds and musts of adulthood.

Now, when I’m thinking about work, I sometimes ask: is this job a real job; that is to say: does it do something useful in the world. It’s a profound shame that young people – particularly graduates – in our society, emerge out of higher education and into ‘careers’ such a graduate recruitment, marketing and various nebulous ‘consultancies’ – often, in reality, jobs that simply service other jobs in the system; which in turn, service other jobs and so on up the corporate pyramid. And as we’ve seen recently, the pyramids of the corporate world are not nearly as stable as we had thought, hoped and trusted.  

So in asking us to look behind the bottom line, the FTSE and the pension plan, David Whyte reminds us that work is part of the human experience and part of the lifelong work of shaping and re-finding our identify and calling. However much we’d like to think otherwise, simply surviving or even thriving economically is ultimately meaningless. To be authentic, he reminds us, it to have good work.

With love

Steve

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”.

What saddens me is that the best thinkers of our time don’t seem to be able to hold both positions. People have always have had experiences of enlightenment and transcendence. Historically this would always have been within a religious context; now we have other paradigms in which to experience these things. Some people still have a more traditional way of thinking about it – Islamic theology and the ‘rapture’ beliefs of the new Christian movements in the USA. However, nowadays thinkers are explaining these experiences in the light of our scientific speculation, questions and understandings – the big bang, quantum physics, DNA and so on – some are trying to integrate science with the meditative traditions from different cultures – but this is still only just a glass to see through. Science and religion, philosophy and enlightenment – they’re still human activities seen through the lens of the mind. James Hillman might not have written in quite like this, but the sentiment could be his: “It’s the psychology stupid”.

A human experience – transcendent or mundane – is a human experience. It might be explained by science (a god spot in the brain perhaps) or in a spiritual paradigm that speculates and believes in a ‘beyond’ – whether this be a traditional heaven, a life after death, reincarnation, god or a meeting of some kind of evolutionary, universal consciousness in the ‘here and now’. One of the most powerful ideas around at the moment is the spiritual enlightenment that emerges from being in the present moment – what Eckhart Tolle and others call “the Power of Now”. It uses the ‘new-age’ language of living one’s life purpose, awakening and being in the present – but essentially it does what many other traditions have recognised before – that a meditative state of mind can be profoundly powerful and enlightening for human beings.

However does this necessarily have to be within a spiritual framework? Ken Wilber has mapped out the wide and rich extent of religion, psychology and what he calls ‘growth technologies’ – all of which could just tell us that there’s nothing new under the sun. I have a lot of suspicion about the idea that somehow human consciousness is something special and connected spiritually to the physical universe. It seem to me to be the ultimate in human grandiosity to see consciousness as anything more than a wonderful evolutionary accident. And yet ‘enlightenment’ IS wonderful, and can feel transcendent, but I have no problem in holding the knowledge that my DNA and life experiences have combined to make me who I am, alongside the sense that I can have an experience of soul, destiny and calling . This is, I believe, the SECULAR soul -and of course this view, and these words, are also only a product of my own psychology…

I’ve been working over the last few weeks on a number of new consultancy and training offerings. The first is designed to address the new Health Work Wellbeing initiative and the HSE’s stress management standards – and to go far beyond. The Lifescape Wellbeing with a difference flyer can be downloaded HERE.

Secondly I’m launching a series of talks and workshops with the title Development with a difference. This series can be delivered as keynote talks and speeches – as well as longer workshops. Titles include the secrets of happiness, the wellbeing puzzle, the poet inside and the creative self. These eclectic and engaging presentations are peppered with poetry, wisdom and insights from psychology, science, organisational development and the arts. Download the flyer HERE.

Finally, through creative thorp I’m publishing editions - a themed series of poetry pamphlets available for purchase separately or by subscription. Find out more about the series and how to get hold of these beautifully presented booklets at the creative thorp weblog, and you can download the editions 2008 flyer and order form for the series.

  (click on the thumbnails to view the cover images)

What after all do stress and wellbeing mean anyway? What do we really mean by this in this world, our cultures – in work and life, in the dimensions of mind, body and soul? By seeing stress as the problem, we trap ourselves in a kind of physiological and cultural prison of the three ‘F’s (fight, flight and sexual reproduction). So how can go beyond this to reach our potential, to live and work in ways that are (as James Hillman might put it) psychological in nature, and therefore living out our calling in the world? That is, a life that is based, not on what makes us the same as each other in our limbic system, but the potential we have to become fully ourselves as individual human beings in relation to each other and the world we live in. This is, in part, as much about our wholehearted engagement with work that is right for us, as it is about stress management and symptom reduction.

Not that long ago ‘stress at work’ was a bit of a creature of myth – you could either believe in it or not. For some, stress was just something that people who couldn’t cope with work used as an excuse for not doing it – a trade union-inspired trick to justify inefficiency, incompetence and absence. And for others it was a terrible monster at the heart of organisations caused purely by bad and vindictive managers: the inescapable result of our work-obsessed, capitalist culture (believe me, I’ve heard and read both views expressed many times without exaggeration). Now, as a result of the patient work of researchers and practitioners over the past few decades, and more recently the development of the Health and Safety Executive’s Stress Management Standards, stress management is right at the heart of things! Stress is finally ‘in’ in the UK.

As a ‘stress management professional’ I should be celebrating; but I think something is being missed. Stress we know, is both a psychological and physiological phenomenon, and there’s plenty of really good work about the ways in which stress can make people ill. However in the sense that we use it today – ‘stress’ is a increasingly cultural – becoming more and more defined, not by its role in mediating the mind-body relationship at a basic level – but in what we can do to escape stimuli, and what happen to us when we get trapped in the state of what our mind makes of circumstances. As Robert Sapolski has shown us, it is modern human beings who get stress related diseases – zebras don’t get ulcers. Nowadays being free from and managing stress has become an environmental risk assessment exercise on the one hand, and a preventative, ‘opt-out’ lifestyle choice on the other.

In my work and practice, I’m more interested in the relationships between the dualisms of life – mind and body; motivation and success; work and play; individual and organisation; personality and culture – and the calling of the soul. No matter how much we might adjust our workplaces to manage the stress risk – there are some basic, intuitive and research based truths:
* that individuals come into work with complex psychological patterns, motivations and life experiences;

* that hard engaging work can, if it is the right work, can be one of the most fulfilling experiences a human being can have;

* that some people are temperamentally suited to some activities and roles– including work – and others are not;

*…..and we all have a personality, with individual strengths – and when work matches these we will be happy, motivated and fulfilled.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s lifelong work on the phenomena of ‘flow’ – shows that this authentic, optimal human condition is central to personal happiness – and therefore to the success of the organisations they work within. When we are challenged, and we have the skills to meet the challenge – we are in the ‘zone’. And when we are motivated by our fundamental calling and values, and THESE meet the challenge – happiness results.

Peter Senge – whose Fifth Discipline book revolutionised management theory and practice – takes it further. Recently he and his collaborators have shifted attention to the profound, authentic changes that can take place when individuals and their organisations work and learn together at this deeper level, a phenomenon they calls ‘presence’. These approaches recognise the depth and complexity of human beings and the system and places they live and work within.

So presence and flow are, for me, more fundamental than stress and wellbeing. I think my main concern is that approaches to stress management and wellbeing at work are starting to run down well-worn channels and become mechanical. In this way of thinking, if we fix this conditions (as set out in the HSE’s stress management standards) – or we learn that personal wellbeing ‘skill’ (resilience, relaxation and the like) then we can prevent the problems that stress brings.

Which is fine up to a point, but we know this not to be wholly true – again our experience and intuition tells us that we take our ‘selves’ into work, just as we take work home. And we know that individuals make a big difference – a new energetic leader, or an jaded old ‘jobsworth’ can, just be being there, heat things up to boiling point, never mind all the safeguards and standards we might have in place.

This approach is truly ‘risk assessment’ and reduction – it brings our organisations in line, keeps them level and calm, aims to avoids volatility and change. Yet we also know that the best organisations are often unpredictable – even chaotic – but ultimately the most creative and embracing of change. These workplaces are demanding, frustrating and contradictory and often evoke great ambivalence. They can make us as angry, disappointed and sad, as they can sometimes inspire intense loyalty or motivate and make us happy. And so they are deeply human places.

This, then, is the wellbeing puzzle, and it poses some fundamental questions, namely:

* how can we bring life to individuals and organisations and make our work organisations places where we are willing to take risks?

* how can we reach further into ourselves so we can feel contradictions and conflicts as positive, potentially developmental and profoundly human?

* how can we to dig below the surface of both individual psychology AND the undercurrents and archetypes of our organisations and workplaces;

*….and ultimately, how can we begin to experience and recognise what needs to happen to enable us to feel joy at work!

Christmas trees, by Mary Thorp.

Building a snowman by Sarah Thorp