O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Freeing the Trapped Spirit Within

 

Increasing Joy

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the spirit Ariel, living on a remote island, has been confined in a cloven pine tree by a spell. When the wise and learned Prospero, sent into exile, lands on the island, he agrees to free the spirit if Ariel does his bidding—to create a storm, a tempest so large it will cause the shipwreck of Antonio, the man who plotted his murder by sending Prospero and his young daughter out to sea in a doomed vessel.

This photo inspired me to recall Shakespeare’s last great play and to reflect on the symbolic meaning of the imprisoned spirit. Ariel is the spirit of fire, of air, of wind, or water and has the gift “to fly / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl’d clouds” (I.ii.190-192). He brings a balance to life, easing suffering and providing safety. He is that spirit in all of us that brings to birth the creative imagination.

Elusive Joy

Yet Ariel is elusive. He represents that inner part of us that stirs the unconscious toward freedom. Just as Ariel is imprisoned in the pine, we close off our creativity, leaving it dormant. The forgotten inner self is abandoned in childhood as the demands to prosper drive us forward into adult responsibilities. Ariel represents the inborn gift in each of us that gets trapped within.

Freeing Your Creativity

In psychotherapy, the process of looking at what we have kept secret, unknown in the depths of conventionality or conformity, lays bare this spirit waiting to be released. Sometimes it is a creative urge, to sing, to dance, to play, or to make music. Finding it again requires forgiveness, whether of self or of others who have played a part in squelching the Ariel within. By looking at our discarded parts and turning towards them, we begin to befriend our hidden, inner selves.

Setting Ariel free requires acknowledging the spirit within, giving voice to suppressed desire. But it also helps to be open to joy as it comes. William Blake’s poem “Eternity” expresses the importance of openness:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

The spirit of Ariel may light upon your shoulder for just a moment. Being able to feel that joy in those brief moments, not clinging, just noticing and appreciating, is a step toward bringing awareness to all the moments of your life.

What part of yourself are you keeping imprisoned? As Shakespeare writes at the end of the play:

Prospero [found] his dukedom
In a poor isle and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own. (V.i.206-210)

To be fully present in life involves freeing your Ariel within. The last words of the play before the epilogue are Prospero’s to Ariel: “My Ariel, chick, / That is thy charge: then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well!” (V.i.317-319).

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Mindfulness in Everyday Life: Letting Everything Become Your Teacher

Mindfulness in Everyday LifeSometimes we can’t ignore external signals to be mindful. My puppy is a reminder. When I am absorbed in a task, usually at the kitchen table on my laptop, she will quietly move into position next to the chair and nudge my leg with a toy. If I ignore her attempts to get my attention in this gentle way, she will increase her efforts by pressing the toy into my leg more forcefully. If that doesn’t work, whimpering will. Recognizing the need for a break, I take the stuffed toy outside so she can chase it. I am reminded that life exists beyond the computer screen. Sometimes it takes a puppy to nudge us toward mindfulness.

In Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “In my tradition, we use the temple bells to remind us to come back to the present moment. Every time we hear the bell, we stop talking, stop our thinking, and return to ourselves, breathing in and out, and smiling. Whatever we are doing, we pause for a moment and just enjoy our breathing.”

In mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) we practice both formal and informal meditation. Formal practice is sitting and lying-down meditation, or a guided body scan. In these practices, the focus is on the breath, or—in the body scan—the area of the body we are focusing on in a guided meditation. When our mind wanders, we bring it back to the breath without judgment, doing this over and over again for the duration of the meditation. Minds will wander off the focus of the breath a million times, but the instruction is to bring the mind back to the breath a million times.

Practicing Mindfulness

Informal practice means performing a routine activity mindfully. By being fully present in a mundane activity that we often do thoughtlessly, we change the experience. Eating a meal mindfully, without watching TV or reading—noticing the food, sensing the texture, the flavor, the smell, the colors, and really tasting the food—is one informal meditation practice. Usually, we eat with numerous distractions and wolf down food so that before we know it, we are done eating and don’t remember having tasted our food or even having eaten.

Practice doing any routine activity mindfully. Brushing teeth, folding laundry, washing the dishes, and getting dressed are all ways to practice mindfulness. We often use distraction when performing mundane activities to prevent boredom. Yet by bringing awareness to a puppy’s prompting or a child’s insistence on playing one more game of Chutes and Ladders, we find them surprisingly interesting. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says in Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness, “If you are cultivating mindfulness in your life, there is not one thing that you do or experience that cannot teach you about yourself by mirroring back to you the reflections of your own mind and body.” It is in the stillness of focus that we observe where our minds wander. Later, we use this information to know ourselves more deeply.

Bringing Awareness to Daily Life

When a child or a puppy interrupts you, you can use the opportunity to notice your thoughts and your breathing. Being attentive to what you are doing in the moment invites inner stillness and reflection. By bringing awareness to aspects of life that otherwise may slide by, it is possible to wake up from automatic pilot and connect more intentionally with the present. If you have been living life on automatic pilot, as most of us do, then taking these opportunities when they present themselves opens up experience. If you are fully aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations in your body, you can change the experience; you have more choice, more freedom. And this can have a profound effect on feelings of depression and anxiety. In a recent MBCT group, several participants commented that being mindful allowed them to stay focused without judging when family tensions arose. Being able to experience difficult emotions knowing that they will pass brings equanimity in the face of challenges.  

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The fullest experience of the adventure of life: Eleanor Roosevelt, Blogging, and Mindfulness

I just returned from Rhinebeck, NY, where I took an intensive professional training course in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for the Prevention of Depression Relapse. The five-day course was developed for health-care professionals who already have experience with mindfulness-based approaches.

Many years ago, I studied Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with its developer, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Since that time, research has continued to demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness training in treating many forms of emotional difficulties. Offspring treatments that involve mindfulness as a major component to their treatment protocol include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

Taking a course in MBCT  gave me the opportunity to study with one of the major researchers and writers in the field. It was given by Zindel Segal, PhD, and Susan Wood, MSW, LCSW. Dr. Segal is the author of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, 2002, The Guilford Press.

While the course was valuable and added to my skills in teaching this treatment approach, the highlight of the trip was my excursion to Val-Kill, the unpretentious, comfortable home of Eleanor Roosevelt. Just down the road in Hyde Park, NY, stands the opulent estate of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ms. Roosevelt created her separate home in a style that reflected her sensibilities, not those of her husband. Set among trees and brooks, the house contains simple furniture and cozy, intimate rooms.

I was fascinated to learn that Eleanor Roosevelt was a kind of pioneering blogger extraordinaire. She wrote a daily letter to Americans that came to be called “My Day,” one of the most popular syndicated columns of the time. She wrote her column six days a week, often dictated in any free moment she found. She published over five hundred words per column, at least six days a week for 26 years from 1936-1962. Personal as well as socially relevant, her work communicated her thoughts, joys, and intimate concerns.

As a beginning blogger, I have wondered about my urge to write. In a previous post, I talked about how this form of writing allows me to take my many years as a psychologist and put words to this experience that can go beyond the confines of my confidential private office. Social media has provided a means for anyone to make his or her thoughts and opinions public, taking journaling to a new level—but not an unprecedented one, as I saw by Eleanor’s example.

Pleasant and Unpleasant Events Calendar

I often suggest that my clients journal. Collecting thoughts and feelings by observing them and taking the extra step to write them down allows insights to emerge. In MBCT, one of the first homework exercises is to write a daily note about a pleasant and an unpleasant experience that occurred during the day. By noting the thoughts, feelings, and sensations associated with such experiences, we bring mindful awareness to daily life. This can allow us to experience and appreciate the moment simply as it is, without adding further elaboration in the form of wishing, dreading, or judging. It is often our mental elaboration that triggers rumination, a common symptom in depression. We can begin to realize that even unpleasant events can be tolerated. Bringing awareness to each situation, whether we label it good or bad, is an important step in learning to relate differently to them. This takes practice. And curiosity.

The Fullest Experience of the Adventure of Life

As Eleanor Roosevelt writes in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys For a More Fulfilling Life, “There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. . . . The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.”

Being attentive to thoughts and writing them down takes discipline. When keeping a journal (or a thought record of daily events, or writing a blog) our life experience is enlarged and enriched. For people struggling with depression, being able to notice even slightly positive things during the day allows them to see that such events are already there for them. For some, it may be noticing the song of a bird, or the stars on a clear night—these simple experiences are always within reach, but for someone who struggles with depression, they go unattended. Writing is a vehicle of self-expression.

References:

Roosevelt, E. (2001). My Day: The best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s acclaimed newspaper columns, 1936-1962. D. Emblidge (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Roosevelt, E. (2011). You learn by living: Eleven keys for a more fulfilling life. New York: Harper Perennial.

Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. New York: Guilford.

 

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Appreciating the Absence of Pain

 

You don’t appreciate not having a toothache until you have a toothache.  Sitting in the endodontist’s chair last week, I was asked if my tooth ached.  I paused for a long moment, and then replied, “ache is a very vague term”.  We both laughed.  Pain is difficult to measure.  Equally difficult to measure is joy– elusive and fleeting.

Thich Nhat Hanh used the toothache analogy when he spoke to a group of therapists many years ago. “When you have a toothache, you are enlightened—you know something very important—that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. “

He further elaborated; “when you do not have a toothache, you don’t seem to enjoy it—peace is there in the present moment, but we find it boring and that is why we look for something more exciting”.   It feels so good when a toothache finally goes away.  If only we could appreciate the absence of that pain all the time.

Not all pain can be resolved by a dental procedure.  We are surrounded by pain in our work.  We see so many varieties of suffering, some themes repeated like a familiar chorus, others particular and unique to a single human being.   Our hearts ache with the daily news from places both remote and in our own backyards.  But when we experience extraordinary pain, we remember how fortunate we were for the time when pain was absent. Most of the time, however, we slug through our days, not noticing the absence of pain.

During the root canal, I listened to a favorite playlist on my iPod.  Steve Jobs had died a few days before.  I could not help but silently thank him for the music that distracted and entertained me, drowning out the sound of the drill.  Like many, I shed tears when I heard the news of the great man’s death. Grief is too strong a word for my feelings.  Rather, I felt a tender softness for the man I never met, for he enhanced my life at almost every turn.  From the podcasts that enrich me, to the MacAirbook that keeps track of my notes and projects, power points and photos, to the iPad that keeps me from double booking my clients (most of the time) and gives me a library full of books, and finally to that most magical of devices, my iPhone—that lets me check the weather, the news, the map, and gives me countless sources of entertainment.

Technology has enhanced our lives.   We have become experts at multitasking.  But it is in the moments of quiet, when our senses are awake, that we can feel the absence of ache.

Autumn has arrived.  October is my favorite month.  It is the month of my birth, but that is not the main reason I love it.  I love the long shadows and the harvest moon.  The light and the darkness meld into one another as the center of day holds until it succumbs and leaves the evenings long, for soup, for hearth, for stories.

And with the arrival of autumn, the holiday season approaches.  Our clients feel the tug of opposing emotions—joy, gratitude, resentment, and disappointment. We listen.   And we try to help integrate their dark and light.

But at the end of the day, we must shed our helping selves for a time, so that we can appreciate the absence of ache.  So that we can enjoy the moments that, when strung together, give us that delicious taste of all that is good in our lives.

“Be hungry, be foolish.”  Mr. Jobs spoke that advice at Stanford after hearing of his cancer diagnosis.    As we head into this holiday season where autumn fades into winter, let’s remember to be hungry for creative urges, for love, and for all that feeds us around the hearth. In our consulting rooms as we listen deeply to our clients as they work with their pain let us be present.

I remind myself to be playful and look for newness even if it seems foolish.  Mindful living is to be in touch with life—in order to enjoy the presence of your non- toothache.

Originally published:  President’s Column October 21, 2011