Totality
In her book, Arendt notes that, by stoking tribal nationalism, any nation of people can be persuaded that it is surrounded by “a world of enemies”. This paranoid state then makes way for the ideology that states that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with and better than all others, thereby excluding the very possibility of a common family of humankind, a sisterhood and brotherhood of all humans, indeed of Creation as a divine whole. For such a ploy to succeed, the innate human sense of community (among peoples) and belonging (to the wider sphere of the natural world) needs to be smashed…
Protection
Thus begins the gradual crumbling of denial which many of us have maintained all our adult life until such an epiphany occurs. It may come through the questions posed by a therapist or something as mundane as an old photo found while cleaning up the drawers of a desk, or even the aroma of baking bread wafting from a stranger’s house in the neighbourhood. I have extended the scope of the question, for example in the following ways: When you were being constantly bullied at school, who protected you? Where was the protection when, as an eight-year-old , you were sexually molested by that priest who lived in the street opposite the school? In each case, the same answer: “Nobody”.
His Story
In his recently-published work, “The Wisdom of the Odyssey”, one of our leading cotemporary Homeric academics, Phil Cousineau, highlights the contrast between the outward journey towards war and victory at Troy, and the onerous disoriented, decade-long, return journey undertaken by Odysseus, to his wife, son and subjects, stating that: While the Iliad asks: “How should one face death and earn honour?”, the Odyssey asks: “How should one live after war and find one’s way home?”…
Living On Purpose
Imagine reaching the end of your life and realizing that the person you became was not the person you could have been. Not because you lacked talent, intelligence, or opportunities. Not because life was unfair, but rather because you had spent decades being driven by forces you could not see, chasing goals that were never truly yours in the first place, diligently sitting in the orchestra, following the baton of the conductor, playing a symphony you have never truly comprehended, playing a tune that is not your own. Many great teachers have pointed out the necessity of carving out our own unique path in life, not following a path that has already been trodden…
Awe
Because many of us rarely experience awe or do so only sporadically, we remain unaware of its beneficial effects on our state of heart and mind. When most of us have the experience of feeling down, for example, we usually look for distraction through busyness or light relief through comedy or entertainment. These are not only less effective than awe; they may, in fact, be counterproductive in that our stress levels are ultimately increased by the end of the day. Cultivating awe, on the other hand, can still the mind and trigger a great mental shift, propelling our neural activity beyond what had become its predictable comfort zone…
Summer Solstice
We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean. This encounter with the „wildness without“ is conducive to our opening up to the „wildness within“, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society…
Indivisible Reality
When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to „Cologne Cathedral“ and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter „unknown“. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…
Boundaries
It is incredulous that we survived such experiences as children. The abuse was bad enough, but the icing on the cake was the fact that no one was there to turn to for solace, for protection, for understanding, for solidarity, for a comforting hug. I dared not bring it up with my parents for fear that a second round of punishment would ensue. This stance emanated from my observation of how my parents treated older siblings in similar circumstances. I was smarter than that, I surmised. Into that trap I would not fall. It is this „no one being there for us in our time of need“ which is described by Gabor Maté as the „über wound“…
Vulnerability
It was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up. There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too. Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope.
Dealing With Fear
I have had countless discussions with others in recovery or on the threshold of such an approach. The hallmark question that has emerged from these interactions is: “How safe did you feel while growing up? To my genuine surprise, an overwhelming majority of people answered that they often didn’t feel safe, and then went on to describe aspects of a nebulous state of distress which comprised one or more of the following: danger, risk, peril, threat, hazard, jeopardy, trouble, distress, chaos, unpredictability, instability, vulnerability, violability, etc….
