talks

WHAT’S PSYCHOLOGY GOT TO DO WITH IT?
A talk on the connection between psychology and body symptoms, given in 2005 at the Embury room, Waterstone’s bookshop, Piccadilly.

When I had nearly finished preparing this talk, I had a dream that I was giving a talk on ‘causality and synchronicity”. Great, I thought, my daytime self is preparing one talk and my nighttime dreaming self has opted to give a different one. Nonetheless I started noticing various synchronicities that were occurring at this time and also remembered when I first started thinking of giving a talk. I was still living in Brazil at the time and I picked up a book that had been on my shelves for years but which I had never read. The book was by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett and is entitled ‘First Love’.
The passage that struck me as I was thinking about a talk on pain and symptoms runs as follows:

“I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains. I think them through daily, it doesn’t take long, thought moves so fast, but they are not only in my thought, not at all… But even them I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else….
I’ll tell them to you some day if I think of it, if I can. my strange pains, in detail, distinguishing between the different kinds, for the sake of clarity, those of the mind, those of the heart or the emotional co native, those of the soul ( none prettier than these) and finally those of the frame proper, first the inner or latent, then those affecting the surface, beginning with the hair or scalp and moving methodically down, without haste, all the way down to the feet beloved of the corn, the cramp, the kibe, the bunion, the hammer toe, the nail ingrown, the fallen arch, the common bain, the club foot, duck foot, goose foot, pigeon foot, flat foot, trench foot and other curiosities.”

Beckett’s character is not alone in having difficulty understanding other people, Most of us at some time or other have difficulty in our relationships. And when it comes to aches and pains, most of us, like Beckett’s character can register some of them and catalogue them, but we don’t necessarily understand them that well. We are most likely to react to them by either putting up with them for a while in the hope that they will just leave like an unwanted guest or by trying to get rid of them, like an uninvited and unwanted guest. We go to the chemist and get a pill, an ointment , or we may go and see our GP or complementary practitioner for pills, potions, massage ,manipulation, acupuncture, dietary advice or whatever. Or if it is a more serious illness we may to go for surgery or other invasive treatment.

Much of the language surrounding illness is of combat. Fighting a cold or suppressing it as though it were a form of bodily insurrection, fighting disease, killing off the bugs and germs and viruses, and,of course, painkillers .There is now a huge industry built around headaches and colds, flu and sore throats alone, Both to relieve or suppress the symptoms or, as a pre-emptive strike, to prevent us being susceptible to them in the first place. From all of these methods of treating symptoms most have been shown to help some of the people some of the time, but have also not helped all of the people all of the time. I wonder who else here apart from myself has had a symptom, minor or severe, for which they found nothing seemed to help?

I suspect that few of us, in addition to trying out all the possibilities mentioned above also go to the symptom itself for guidance. We tend not to be taught to investigate them with open minded curiosity. In the middle ages, they used the expression “ searching out a wound”. In his own way Arnold Mindell, whose work underpins all that I want to discuss this evening, does exactly this . He searches out symptoms and pains to see what they tell us. How does he do this…Perhaps at this point I might tell a personal story, as it was through a painful symptom that I originally became interested in his work. The book, Working with the dream body had been recommended to me sometime before, but it was one of those that had lain on the shelf waiting for the right moment. Pain provided the prompt.

A rather embarrassing pain it was at the time, as it was quite literally a pain in the arse. It wasn’t haemorrhoids, though that, too, I had suffered from years before (it’s surprising when you talk about symptoms that people don’t much talk about, to find how many other people suffer from them.) It was just one those pains that people preferred not to mention. Anyway on this occasion I had what the doctor described as a fissure and I remember at the time feeling it as though someone had put lemon juice into a cut. Well, over 2 or 3 months I tried everything - I went to my doctor, I went to a homeopath, an acupuncturist, I changed my diet, I took vitamins, I relaxed in hot baths, I swam. Nothing really made any difference whatsoever. How long can this go on for, I wondered. So at this point, as I said, I started reading this book - Working with the Dream body - and I eventually came across this exercise which suggested that if you have a troublesome symptom, try making it worse. I laughed and thought to myself - you’ve got to be kidding - try making it worse, that’s the last thing on earth I want to do, that’s totally crazy. And anyway I hate doing exercises in books. Then, a moment later, something inside of me said, well you’ve tried all the sensible ways and they havn’t helped, so why not now try the crazy way? After all, it’s just a short exercise, what have you got to lose. Grudgingly I agreed. To have spent so much time and money seeing all these professionals and then not to want to try out this crazy exercise that cost me nothing and didn’t even require me to even set foot outside my own house – that itself would have been crazy. The way he suggested to make the symptom worse was to amplify it -simply sitting down, closing your eyes and focusing on it until you could feel precisely what it was like. It’s a curious thing but you can suffer from something for months and tell everyone how painful it is, but never accurately describe what that pain is like. I mean if you took your car to a garage and said it was making a noise they would probably ask you what kind of a noise it was, where did it come from, did it make it all the time or just when it went over a bump or whatever. Yet if you have, for instance, a headache, it is unlikely that you will be asked specifically what kind of headache it is.

Anyway I focused on this pain in the manner he suggested which I will quote to you here:

“Be exact, examine the aches and pains as if you have never felt them before. Do not be content with general terms like nausea, heart palpitations, headaches, arthritis, fever, multiple sclerosis, eczema, stomach ache, tension etc. These are general terms. I want you to explore your symptom and be accurate, patient and as specific as possible. This exploratory stage is very important because you are leaving your medical knowledge, which explains things but does not experience them, behind. Go into the details of the pressures, find out if they change, feel them…. While you are studying your pain, it is very useful not to move. Just lie in bed in order to feel your pain better.”

As I mentioned earlier, I focused on this very sharp pain, like acid in a cut, and it did indeed get worse. You may remember that Beckett’s character says that the reason he doesn’t understand his pains better may be because he is not ‘all pain and nothing else’ and there is some sense in this, for as I gritted my teeth and stayed totally concentrated on the pain something very strange happened. A sequence of images came to me like a movie clip – a young girl was walking up to the vestry door of a church. She opens the door walks through and drops over a precipice, but as she drops a parachute opens and she lands safely below into a shallow stream.

I have to say I thought this rather bizarre and couldn’t really see what on earth this had to do with anything. I later discovered that the theory as outlined in this book is that when you reach the limits in one channel of experience- in this case proprioception or physical sensation, the experience automatically flows into another one, in this case visual. I was someone who was not that connected to my body experiences and Mindell tells us that disturbances will most often come in that channel that is least occupied – the one that we feel least familiar with. Processes, however, are like water, and naturally follow the path of least resistance and so when I had reached the limit of experience in that channel it switched to a visual one which is more familiar for me. What struck me about the dreamlike images I had seen was the unexpectedness of both opening the door and dropping over the precipice and then of a parachute opening out of nowhere. My curiosity was definitely aroused, but I read no further that day.

I went to bed and slept well that night and the next morning I woke up and to my surprise I no longer had any pain whatsoever. This reflected the unexpectedness in the dream. I didn’t quite believe it and walked and moved around suspecting that this was just a momentary relief and that it would soon re-appear …except it didn’t. You would imagine that I was delighted, but in fact I was furious. Pains don’t just plague you for months and then disappear overnight. I had imagined that if the pain were to go it would gradually ease and disappear, not just go instantly. Yet they can appear instantly, so why should they not disappear instantly. Relief came out of nowhere, like the parachute opening. Now I should add here that I don’t believe that this is the magical cure for all symptoms and illness. It is still, in a sense, a mystery as to why on this occasion it should have healed. As Mindell says, it is quite possible for consciousness to transform and yet the body retain it’s diseases. What he has shown, though, is that there is information contained within symptoms and illnesses that is meaningful to our lives; or, as he puts it, ‘symptoms are their own medicine.’ So looking back on those images I had then, I now see that there was a spiritual aspect even to a pain in the arse. The unexpected and the unknown and what we fear often has the key. And since then, I can indeed think of situations where I have taken a leap or fallen into an unknown situation and something unpredictable has happened hat has baled me out, even though my faith in the parachute opening has always been shaky. Within the symptom was a dream trying to unfold.

In fact it was just this that Arnold Mindell discovered and how he came to start writing books. He had found, working as a Jungian psychoanalyst, that the same figures that appeared in people’s dreams also appeared in their symptoms. What does this mean. Again, I’ll give a simple example. I once had a dream that a car shunted into the back of mine and the next day I was walking along and I suddenly felt a sharp a pain, like a jolt, in my back. The jolt of the car shunting into the back of mine in the dream mirrored the experience of that pain the next day – it was the same movement experience. Dreams are of course visual, but within the dream it was about a movement experience ( as was the earlier one of the parachute that I mentioned) The next day the pain was of course proprioceptive-it was a bodily sensation, but if I had described the experience of how the pain was created, I would have said it was as though someone had given me a jolt from behind.They both have the same lurch. The idea is that the channel in which someone describes a dream or symptom is going to be the one that they will find most easy to follow, for really you are following them, you are on the same track, as it were.

So you will see here that there are two distinct figures both in the dream accident and in the back pain. There is the one who creates the accident or pain and the one who feels a victim of it. We have a tendency to identify with the one who suffers the pain and not the one who creates it - the pain maker – the car that runs into the back. Quite often we react by getting furious with the pain maker, or the driver of the other car, as the case may be! Yet the energy is usually with the pain maker; as in the car accident that is where the action is. The re-action comes from the victim. If you have a symptom like a headache you will tend to have a tired weary expression and just want to lie down, but if you are asked to describe the headache you say that it is throbbing. Now you can talk about tension and what happens physiologically but on the psychological or dreaming level you have to ask who is the figure doing the throbbing? At this stage you could ask the person with the headache to describe this throbbing in terms of it’s strength and rhythm and show this by hitting a fist against the other open hand.

By following the symptom in movement you act out the two parts of this system -the suffering head and the throbber; by identifying with both you gain access to both. I may still have a headache but I am no longer solely identified with the one suffering. Arny Mindell has termed these two aspects of the symptom as the primary process and the secondary process. The primary is the one we identify with and the secondary is the one we tend not to identify with. Ask anyone to describe themselves to you and they will be telling you what their primary process is. If you then ask them what they can’t quite do, you will get a glimpse of what their secondary process might be. So you might say that at the time of my dreaming of the car and the one shunting into it, I would have described myself as being a fairly quiet person who went along minding his own business. I would identify less with someone who is more confrontative and who, as it were, runs into people. So you can see that what started out as dream, also appeared as a symptom and then moved into the area of relationship. This reflects the tendency of processes, when unfolded, to connect different areas of experience. To use the physicist David Bohm’’s terminology – Processes have their own implicate order – the unfolding of them makes this explicit.

Anyway , to get back to the headache - once I have accessed this throbber within the headache – then what? Well I could go further – I could dramatise the conflict between the two figures of the poor sufferer and the throbber. The sufferer might say: “Oh just leave me alone, I just want a quiet life and to be left in peace,” whereas the throbber might say something like “ you’re a wimp, why don’t you get out there and do something in the world instead of hiding yourself away” and so on.

Here I have moved away from this movement experience of fist against hand to a relationship conflict. The conflict is internal, but it is likely that this internal conflict is also appearing somewhere in my outer relationships too. We don’t know exactly how this conflict would play itself out, but you could bet that something of the two sides of this conflict or headache are needed – in this example :the sensitivity and quietness and the more pugnacious and energetic. So why do the two sides remain polarised? Well, Arnold Mindell came up with the concept of the edge. The edge is a belief system that keeps us fortressed in our primary identity. This edge is created by personal, family, cultural and religious beliefs about ourselves. I am this and not that. In this case it could be “ I am a nice quiet guy and I don’t like to get into arguments and conflict.” Now I am not saying that this conflict is what causes the headache, but I am suggesting that it is embedded within it. Similarly, we don’t know what causes a dream or why we remember a dream, but in the dream of the car accident we can say something about the figures represented by the two cars. At the very least these two figures hitch a ride on the back of the dream and the body symptom.The connection between the dream and the body symptom Mindell has described as the dreaming body or dream body. Symptoms are, as it were, the body’s equivalent of dreams. The two run in tandem. The mind creates dreams as the body creates symptoms, but work with either and the same figures will appear.

As in my own case, most of us only change and get interested in a new way of doing things when all our usual ways of addressing the situation have been exhausted. If an aspirin will do the trick, all well and good. It is only impossible insoluble situations that really force us to change. These are like koans thrown up by life. For those that don’t know what a koan is, it is a question that a Japanese Zen master would set an apprentice. It would usually be a question whose answer couldn’t be found in your rational repertoire like - what was the face you had before you were born? The question was only properly answered when the master was satisfied. I was actually asked a question like this myself. I have a daughter who has a diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder and a couple of years ago, she asked me “ What will grandma be like when she is a billion and nine.” Now my daughter has problems with the addition of even small numbers, so I was quite taken aback that she even knew there was a number such as a billion and nine. Nonetheless she persisted in getting an answer from me… over a period of weeks!! Miserable apprentice that I am, I offered some lame attempts. I have no idea about reincarnation, but I suggested that maybe grandma might become a baby again. That got some mild interest, but nothing more. Anyway I don’t even remember what else I managed to serve up, but after a few weeks I’d really come to the end of my resources around this. Yet both my parents had died in recent years and it really did strike me as a big mystery as to what happened to that spirit that you identified as grandma, or dad or mom when they died. So when my daughter next asked me the question, I replied that it was a big mystery and she gave me a beaming smile and said “yes, it’s a big mystery.” And I need to add here that if you were to ask my daughter what a mystery was I am fairly certain she wouldn’t be able to tell you, but nonetheless she was, to my relief, satisfied by the answer.

Anyway what I was trying to illustrate is how illnesses that don’t heal are a type of koan that the body throws up that challenge us to the very limit of our resources. It seems that the dreaming body does not relate much to how we feel or to matters of life and death, but only to our awareness and development.

Some symptoms and illnesses have been referred to as being psychosomatic, i.e. that a body symptom develops for psychological reasons. There have also been new age ideas in the past that certain illnesses, even cancer, are caused by our own negativity. Such notions just tend to make people feel guilty about how they are and are probably not that helpful. I’m not sure though that it is ever possible to separate body symptoms from psychology. We all know that if we feel well physically our spirits tend to lift and vice versa if we feel well psychologically it affects our body. You only have to look at someone in love to see this. The body and the mind are intimately interconnected. Modern medicine has often been very effective in treating illness, but not always so good at treating the patient. There is that old joke that “the operation was successful, but the patient died.” The focus of modern medicine has been primarily on the mechanics of the body, on fixing it’s parts, removing tumours, irradiating cancers, transplanting organs. Technically it has been wizardry, but it has come at a cost.

Arnold Mindell proposes that what is needed now is what he terms ‘Rainbow Medicine’– a multi-dimensional approach to medicine which would deal with 3 different levels of reality.

Is where modern medicine belongs – the realm of the measurable. local and physical. What he terms consensus reality. What the mainstream world, by and large, agrees on.

The second level includes what we have been also looking at briefly so far. The dreamland experiences of subjective fantasies, subjective feelings, dreams and dreamlike figures. We can talk about them but they can’t be examined and verified objectively in the way the physical world can and therefore belong to the realm of non-consensual reality.

Finally there is what he calls the essence level of experience – the perception of subtle tendencies. This is close to what you see in animals that pick up things just before they are about to occur. The intimation of something. Connected with this realm would be words like tendencies, flickers, fleeting impulses, subtle tremors, shivers, twinges. This is the level before symptoms actually appear and demands a much greater degree of awareness and attention. This is the level that is most marginalised, like sitting in a room and ignoring a slight draught.

I would like briefly to look for a moment at this last level of experience which Mindell also refers to as nano-awareness.

I recently came across some lines from the mystic poet Rumi where he writes:

The Absolute works with nothing.
The workshop, the materials
Are what does not exist.

Try and be a blank sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
Where something might be planted,
A seed possibly, from the Absolute.

This is another way of talking of that level before symptoms appears , the level where the materials do not exist, where they have not yet materialised – the seed or essence level before anything has sprouted . Often we really don’t know when a symptom actually begins. We know for instance that cancer cells have completed about 75% of their replication before they are even detectable – a million cells would only be the size of a small pinhead. So who knows what the preventative possibilities of working at this essence level might eventually be. Mindell is suggesting, I think, that we become as sensitive in our dreaming body awareness as modern medicine is sophisticated in its technology. Certainly, to pay attention to this level you need to relax and be, so to speak “ a blank sheet of paper” –an ironic metaphor perhaps to be using while we sit above five floors of the printed matter of a bookshop. Mindell says that the way to pick up things at this level is to watch for ‘flirts’ which are those evanescent flickering body sensations that require, first of all, our attention in order to notice them and then our pursuit in order for them to unfold. I remember being invited to give a talk to some body workers years ago and about a minute after I started talking, I noticed that I already felt a slight dryness in my throat. So, in addition to asking for a glass of water, I asked those present if I might focus on it for a second. As I did this, I noticed that I relaxed. I realised that I had been rather straining to put my words across and had begun as it were to ‘dry up’. When I started talking again, it was in a much quieter and more relaxed tone and , perhaps because it was a bit of an odd thing to have done, I had somehow as a result also gained my audience’s attention – which I imagine is what I had been straining to do in the first place!

Funnily enough Mindell tells a story in his book - Quantum Medicine - about being at a family gathering and being a bit bored talking to one of his relatives and asking him if he would be interested try an exercise similar to what I have described. Curiously this man also said that he noticed a dryness in his throat. When the man focused it on it, he had what he called the “strange fantasy of a Native American sitting in the desert.” When asked what this person was doing, the man replied that he was listening to the voices of his ancestors telling him to let go of all his relationship troubles and stop feeling responsible for everyone. Anyway to cut the story short, this relative then mentioned that he had fits of coughing every time he started taking care of someone. He then had the insight that instead of feeling responsible for everyone, he should be more responsible, or rather responsive to ‘what the ancestors were asking of him’.

One advantage of working with both the dreaming level and essence level of symptoms is that it is an immediately available and, in one sense, straightforward resource,once you have some experience in working this way and if you develop the patience, attention and application that this demands. As I said at the beginning, I started simply by doing an exercise from a book with dramatic results. However most of us will, at one time or other also need conventional or complementary treatments.

The problem these days is the complexity of this. In a city like London, especially, there is a startling array of choice and much of it quite costly. Quite often if you have a symptom, you could ask ten different people what treatment they would recommend and you would be likely to get ten different recommendations. The stress of the illness can be compounded by the stress of the choices available and leave you exhausted. How do you choose? I remember years ago reading a book by the anthropologist Margaret Mead entitled ‘Growing up in Papua New Guinea’ in which, comparing adolescents in the US with those from New Guinea, she maintained that the higher incidence of anxiety in American adolescents was, in large part, due to the amount of choice they had to deal with. Well, that book was written over 30 years ago and choice has increased exponentially since then. As I was pondering this, I was reminded of the Greek myth of Theseus and Ariadne and the labyrinth, for this is a myth that , through the image of the labyrinth presents the problem of choice while at the same time providing the means of solving it. It offers plurality – in the paths of the labyrinth, but reduces it to the singular - the one way out. I don’t know if you know this myth, but I’ll just recount it briefly in outline:

At the time, Athens paid to Crete a tribute of seven maidens and seven youths who were then led into a labyrinth where they either got lost and died of starvation or were killed by the minotaur that lived at it’s centre. Theseus volunteered to go as one of the youths with the aim of killing the minotaur, though without a plan as to how; in other words, he was putting his trust in his instincts to see him through. Anyway, when he arrives in Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos and half sister to the minotaur, fell in love with him and, on condition that he would take her back with him as his wife to Athens, gave him a ball of golden thread. This thread had been given to her by Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth and generally a mythic figure of the artist and she was told that if the end of the thread was tied to the lintel of the entrance door the ball would unfurl and lead by many devious twist and turns to the innermost recess where the minotaur was lodged. (Curiously the name for this thread is a ‘clew’ from which our word clue is derived). She gave this to Theseus and said that by simply rolling up the ball again, he would be able to find his way out again. Interestingly it is not clear exactly how Theseus killed the minotaur – this apparently was left to him.

For my purpose here , the important element is that in determining how to set about his task of confronting what was threatening him , he was shown that the way in was quite literally the way out. It is still down to him to confront and deal with the threat, but I take it to mean that, psychologically, the golden thread that leads him in and out is an almost literally imaging of the word in-tuition. The golden thread of intuition is provided by the architect of the labyrinth. I think this is not far from what Mindell says when he states that “One solves a body problem by taking its point of view”. When we can access the creator of the symptom, the force behind it, we get closer to that golden thread of bodily intuition. We may have to make many twists and turns, but if we really remain close to our intuitions and instincts, then odd synchronicities, chance encounters and books and articles that drop into our lap will lead the way. This brings me back to the thread of the dream about causality and synchronicity with which I began this talk and now leads me out to it’s conclusion.

This thread may be all that separates feeling totally lost and at the mercy of the monster to feeling as though you are on the right track and can somehow deal with it. Or, as I once put it during a difficult time, it’s like being up shit creek with a paddle.

Contact details:
David Clark
Email: david@activityzero.com
Mobile: 07711 939 469