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Holiday Time-Be still and listen to your feelings
Then you might be able to listen to your loved ones, and listening, understanding and expressing that understanding, are for many rare and precious events-:)
“In many ways, the most important thing you can do to experience a world without aging is to nurture the knowledge that the world is you.” Deepak Chopra
On the off chance you are NOT overwhelmed with social media, bills, etc, and you need another book to read, as we head into winter, watching the leaves fall and the seasons change- LOL- I recommend Deepak Chopra’s AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. He wrote it years ago, and it’s a classic so I will share some quotations: “Awareness makes a huge difference in aging for although every species of higher life-form ages, only humans know what is happening to them, and we translate this knowledge into aging itself. To despair of growing old makes you grow old faster, while to accept it with grace keeps many miseries, both physical and mental, from your door” p.21. “Your cells are constantly processing experience and metabolizing it according to your personal views.” p.23. “Life at its source is creation..the most basic bodily processes respond to our state of mind” p.36.
I don’t think this means to force yourself into positive thinking. Good reality testing involves coping with all sorts of complex situations, and becoming older takes us closer to death, and for some, death is final and there is nothing more, so the prospect of death can feel terrifying. Nonetheless, we can become more present in the moment, more creative like life itself, if we create an intention to do so. So take care of yourself, and your feelings. Give very part of your emotional experience a home. Welcome every thought, feeling, gut reaction, and if some of these involve pain, fear, dread, sadness, grief, loss, mourning, as well as joy, laughter, humor, affection, be curious, loving and listen to them all, and empathize with the symphony of feeling going on inside. Our feelings are our friends, and they can guide us into a richer present, and when it comes down to it, today, the present, is all we have. Hokey as it sounds, the present really is ‘ a present.’
RELATIONSHIPS ARE COMPLICATED-
Pen Pen and Ink by Alexander Milov from Ukraine
SEPTEMBER SONG
| Poem of the Week PotW.org Founded August 1996 |
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
September
THE golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.
The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.
The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook,
From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.
By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.
But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.
‘T is a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.
Dreaming in August: “THE ANALYST MUST BE LIKE A PAINTER.”
“If, then, the transformations that interest the analyst are those that nourish and grow the mind, it is important to know how to recognize them for at least two good reasons even when they are not evident. First, because only in this way is it possible to map the analytical field and intuit where to meet the patient; and, second, because the perspective that the unconscious has on things is always richer than that of the conscious since it is much more capable of thinking about infinity………The analyst must be like a painter. As a painter, he must know how to use his palette of colors, his emotions and dreams.”
Giuseppe Civitarese in TRANSFORMATIONAL PROCESSES IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS(2019)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s (1995) statement that “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams,” can be paraphrased to apply to psychoanalysis: analyses grow old and stale because the capacity for mutual dreaming between patient and analyst becomes arrested.
In Lawrence Brown’s TRANSFORMATIONAL PROCESSES IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS (2019).
When Old Friends Die
Sometimes we haven’t visited with a friend for a long time, but we still think of them and remember them fondly. We decide to google them, wondering if they are on Facebook or Linked In or some other social media that might allow us to track them down. And sometimes, if we are of a certain age, we discover that they have died, and it’s very sad. This happened to me last night when I thought of an old friend who is (was) an artist. The last time I saw her I bought one of her paintings. And now through the very social media I had hoped would reunite us, I discover she is gone. Goodbye Marina Yashina, I am sorry to know you have passed. The world is less interesting without you.
DON’T BE A VICTIM OF LOVE
Betty Ford, the former (click here for her obituary) first lady of the US, who died in 2011, said something fascinating once about her experience of wanting to have a facelift for her ‘new life’ – once she had overcome cancer and addictions She said that many of her previous supporters felt angry with her about her wanting the face lift, supporting her more enthusiastically when she was fighting breast cancer and battling drug addiction. She believed many people prefer to support others when they are down, as opposed to when they are accomplishing goals, expanding their range of experience, or simply enjoying their lives. She thought that people prefer to root for the underdog, for victims, to whom they can feel superior, rather than to support others when they are strong – when they are flourishing and standing up for themselves. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think many people who have trouble supporting people who are thriving, have been raised by parents who had fears about no longer feeling needed, and fears of losing their small children’s affection and attention once their children began to grow up. Some people who have trouble supporting others when they are strong, have been raised by parents with borderline personality disorder, a condition that is related to extreme fears of abandonment. These people themselves were NEVER supported by their parents when they went outside of the parents own comfort zone. So they are only perpetuating the pattern that was passed down to them. It’s unconscious, and often automatic. Many people are not even aware they are doing it and when asked become defensive and accuse the other of being paranoid. It’s not intentional. Nonetheless it can hurt. Sometimes the pattern simply involves people who thrive on feeling needed by others, a very normal situation. We all like to to feel important, needed, and in less danger of being abandoned. Watching loved ones succeed can trigger feelings of fear that the person doing the growing will no longer need us, and that they might move away from us emotionally and no longer be available when WE need them! But whatever the reasons, and there are as many as there are people in the world, , if you find yourself ‘playing small’ in order to feel loved, to seem nonthreatening, to belong within your social group, think again. Crippling yourself solely for a relationship/s is not a good decision. In the long run it will bring you and the people around you down. Allow yourself to stand strong, and to find supporters who support you when you are strong, when you are vulnerable, when you are HOWEVER you might be feeling, who NEVER abandon you no matter WHAT! Those are the people you want in your court!! That way the range of your own and others emotional experience will grow, and growth and change is essential for staying in touch with a meaningful exciting life (as well as a way of avoiding depression).
POLITICAL DIFFERENCES
CAMPING IS MAGICAL-the air, the green, the sun, the stars. Try it for one night.
