ART HEALS WOUNDS

Narrative Medicine: From Sickness to Health

2011-12-19T14:50:00.000Z

The Altar by Mikalujus Ciurlionis (1909)

This is the second of the monthly installments on the topic of writing and its healing qualities for Olte Confine (Outer Limits) magazine. Issue number two is now out and it continues to show how thoughtful, open-minded inquiry can lead to an informative, tasteful production, beautifully illustrated and presented in magazine format on quality paper.

There is an article on Jiddu Krishnamurti who bravely denounced even his own status as a guru, declining any fawning adulation, and clearly seeing through any organised religious institutions to their power-hungry core by saying "All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man."

There is also an article on Pranic Healing, founded by Choa Kok Sui- and I feel it is necessary to remind people how breathing is the best and easiest connection we have to the spirit. Breathe deeper and longer and we have an instant valium-like easing of stress in our nervous system. That breathing accumulates 'chi' or 'prana' ( life energy) should come as no surprise; likewise, that it can also heal.

Then in the Literature section, an essay on Algernon Blackwood who definitely is worth rereading in this day and age for his subtlety and suggestion of his writing. Don't be deceived by the antiquated style. There is an alternate reality bursting through the veil in most of his stories.

Plus, the front cover of numero due is intriguing, a painting called 'The Altar' by Lithuanian symbolist, Mikalojus Ciurlionis ( 1875-1911) who was also a composer. He, like many who are synaesthetes, perecieved colours and sounds as fused together, so not surprisingly many of his paintings are named after musical forms, sonatas and preludes. His works are marvels of colour and ambiguous shading.

Perhaps the whole magazine could be translated into English one day. I can't think of another quality magazine in English, not ridden with advertising, purely for the interest in the ideas. Each of my columns is translated into Italian each month showcasing the key ideas from the research I've done into how writing heals. This is exclusively shown here and on my blog and the plan is to put them all together into an e-book.

This second installment covers Narrative Medicine or Pathographesis, the proliferation of narratives about how the soul was put on trial in the body through diseases and how that transforms people. The next one is about how keeping a daily diary or journal can keep you sane. So watch out for that in the new year 2012. This is part of a short series of explorations of how writing heals based on my research and experience as a writer of all things difficult, exploring, among other things, how writing can be time travel, yoga, meditation and take us to the core of our minds.

www.kierondevlin.com

For a full pdf of this article click the Oltre Confine image on www.kierondevlin.com

Kieron
www.kierondevlin.com

© Kieron Devlin, all rights reserved, 2011

''Healing Through Writing in 'Oltre Confine'

2011-11-19T20:31:00.004Z

Just to introduce my new monthly column for Olte Confine (Across the Border) magazine. November, Issue Numero Uno is now out and what a splendid production it is. Written in Italian, with headquarters in Rome, it is a tastefully designed feast of philosophical ideas. It is committed to 'global illumination' no less, through acknowledging the fact that we are living through a kind of neo-renaissance era, in which a transformation of the collective consciousness is taking place. 'Across the Border is a publishing project of the Cooperative Inner Space, which aims, through a variety of artistic and cultural activities, to promote the awakening of the spiritual, mental and creative individuals.'

For those, like me, who only know a few words of Italian, here is the first installment in English: Healing Through Writing: An Introduction. For a better view of it, go to my website www.kierondevlin.com. The column is designed to be a short series of explorations of how writing heals based on my research and experience as a writer and purveyor of the psychological interior, and of all things difficult. It will explore, among other things, how writing can be time travel, yoga, hypnosis, meditation and take us to the core of our minds, causing reintegration.

The magazine is a very lavish but elegant, with articles on fascinating artists, and all things esoteric and spiritual. For example the the Zero Issue has an article on one of my all time favourite artists, Odilon Redon, by Silvia Tusi. Redon said once that 'to understand all is to love everything'. Also, the current issue approaches the divinely-inspired William Blake, so favoured by Patti Smith, she featured a reverent visit to Blake's gravestone at Bunhill cemetery here in East London in her documentary film 'Dream of Life' directed by Steven Sebring.

They have an in-house artist who did this impression of me in pencil.The next installment will be on Pathographies: From Sickness to Health. Look out for that. It's a big challenge for me to see if I can write pithily and encompass a great deal in a short space. Giovanni Piccoza, the editor, invited me to render for the Italian readership what I know about how writing and healing interact. So, in a sense, these columns may become tasters for the book I should be writing and a reminder of all the work I still need to do to achieve that- plus, not least that I need to learn Italian, 'e quanto difficile sara'?

Why does writing heal? Simple - as Aristotle said, one of the strongest of human motivations is not food, sex or survival, but self expression. It is as though he meant -we must do that or die.

Kieron
www.kierondevlin.com

Hypnosis and Meditation: Are they the Same or Different?

2011-08-21T12:21:00.009+01:00

They say that "when the student is ready, the teacher appears," but when I began writing this article on Hypnosis and Meditation: Same or Different (Yoga and Health Magazine, August, 2011) it was just the opposite. The teacher appeared in the guise of a student, obliging me to take the role of teacher.

Temple Painting, Neyyar Dam

I was looking for a deeper angle on meditation. I didn't feel my own practice was enough to speak with absolute authority, even though I had trained in Raja Meditation back in eighties with the Philosophy School in the UK. With quiet-spoken candour, verging on shyness, the man I approached feigned ignorance of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. He asked me to explain it to him, as though he was a novice. I was dumfounded - he had flattered me to thinking hypnosis was more interesting to him, when the fact was that I wanted to know more about meditation from him. It was a guileless, but nevertheless, clever technique to put me first and himself last.

From that interview in his office, I gleaned some of the insights into Vedic-style meditation from a serious, long-term meditator. His name was Nataraj - the spiritual director, not the overall master, but the de facto guru of the ashram. 'Nataraj' means 'King of Dancers' referring to one of Shiva's many forms. He explained meditation from the Vedic point of view - but for Buddhists too, meditation is the cornerstone of altering ordinary perception of reality to the subtle energetic layers of existence. It is a direct way of understanding that we are not our body - there is an essence beyond yet within it.

I drew three circles for him to explain what I thought were the similarities and differences between hypnosis and meditation and where they overlapped. This was my rough draft of the chart in the article- still being developed I might add. He offered me ginger tea and seemed only mildly curious about me and my life in England. It was as though he was declaring the outside world to be an 'illusion' to be kept at arm's length; he rarely paid much attention to it, yet any little nuggets of info I could bring from my investigations were curiosities to him. I was, in effect, his news conduit.

This ruse deflected any awkwardness and nerves on my part about being with a real 'guru'. There's this silly idea that they can somehow see right through you. In front of them, you become emotionally naked. I thought 'this must be his strategy of selflessness so that everyone felt good in his presence; felt the allure of the spirit; and he must see a lot of people; yet each one must feel acknowledged; noticed; even though he probably will never remember your name - which would not matter anyway.

For him, the notions of the Causal, Mental and Physical Bodies and how they interconnected were very important, as was the concept of Karma, of cause and effect and Ahimsa (avoiding harm). Getting to the Causal body- where it all starts- is similar to accessing the subconscious mind to reframe beliefs and dispel problems. He asked me to write names that I'd mentioned: Jonathan Goldman, Charles Tart, and the Epsilon frequency. As, he didn't spend a lot of time surfing the net, he was fascinated about the the Dalai Lama who encourages scientists to do experiments on Tibetan monks, monitoring their brain-wave frequencies. I said that the Epsilon frequency, was linked to deep-sleep states, knowledge of which the Tibetans excel.

All this was at the Sivananda Neyyar Dam Ashram, near Trivinandrum, Kerala. Thirty kilometers into the backhills away from the coast, it is well known in the area as a true haven. Yet it still feels like a well-kept secret, being to my mind, one of the most secluded and peaceful beauty spots on earth, nestled as it is on a mountain side, near a lake with soothing water for swimming. Think - jungle foliage, hidden shrines, Ayurvedic massage huts, extraordiary Hindu god statues, a rigorous yoga routine, and the echo of lions roaring in the morning, and there you have it.

It's the perfect place to meditate, especially at dawn, but even if you don't know how to meditate, and prefer just to fix problems by going inwards in the privacy of your own bedroom, it is the same place that you arrive at - the inner space. 'Wherever you go, there you are' says J.Kabat-Zinn, and this is the paradox. We always land just where we are, and that is perhaps just where we are meant to be.

Daily Lecture on Yoga

It has to be said that going to exotic ashrams in itself does not make your meditation any better than anyone else's. Pretty surroundings can even be a distraction, though it does help a bit with peripheral focus. You can effectively do meditation anywhere, even while walking. For those who are stuck in a low-paid, nine-to-five job that doesn't permit holidays to yoga retreats, there's always the comfortable chair at home. Just begin just closing your eyes and 'being there'.

Likewise, for those who are turned off by all the Hindu or Buddhist terminology and iconography, you can relax too: hypnosis with a trained hypnotherapist or a session by yourself of self hypnosis, is a great way - and a gateway! - to the path inwards. Sometimes we don't need to travel far to get where we want to be. It's right there at home all the time.

Fortunately it's all a big cumulative, virtuous circle: the more people can genuinely relax, the more they breathe deeply; the more able they are to connect to their inner energies, the more able they are to gain intuition and insight; the more they are able to relax in situations that used to stress them out, the more they are able to gain a handle on tricky problems; the more confident they get at overcoming obstacles, the less fear and anxiety they experience, and so on and so on.

Siva, Lord of the Dance

So sit with a straight spine and gently close your eyes, listen to the regular intake of breath in and out, rest awhile here, and just BE wherever you are for a few minutes and that's IT. That's just fine.

Follow your goals, but hold on to them lightly, for goals sometimes make us feel upset with what we have.

Both Hypnosis and Meditation are healing and integrative processes - not exactlythe same, but sharing similar approaches - and while there are still people who have difficulties with life, or feel stuck, or afraid, or locked in patterns they can't get out of, these techniques will both be needed to restore harmony.

Namaste

www.kierondevlin.com

Re Energize with Donna Eden

2011-06-15T09:09:00.007+01:00

Let the body think of the spirit
as streaming, rushing,
pouring, shining into it from
all sides.
Plotinus

If you have not discovered Donna Eden before, you are in for a treat. If you already know her, then you’ll realise that she is a powerhouse of light that shines into the field of energy medicine. She is a pioneer of the ideas that the body wants to heal. It is more intelligent than the brain. It is just that we often get in the way or fail to understand its energies. Her work is accessible, without dumbing down, and holds profound implications for the way we conceive of health and the human body. So when she was doing an energy medicine workshop in London, I knew nothing would keep me away. I had to meet this phenomenon. Her energy precedes her and you notice her 'effect' as she bounces on to the stage, grinning endlessly and laughing infectiously. You could - as the announcer said- feel her presence even before you arrived. You just knew she would be a effervescent personality, and that has a tonic effect on your general spirits.

Donna Eden

What is immediately evident is this radiance that makes the electromagnetic field around her almost tangible. After about five minutes of this people were feeding off the energy like vampires. Her spontaneity and fire was in full force. This Eden 'sparkle' most likely comes from working with her own body and charging up its vital force- call it chi or prana – in all its forms. She talks of nine systems, including the meridians lines as used in acupuncture, the triple warmer, the aura, the strange flows ( which align us with longer cycles of nature) and the Celtic Weave. The more people know about these invisible channels of energy, the more likely they are to be of radiant health as Taoist doctors have maintained for centuries.

She is a recoveree from multiple sclerosis and other debilitating diseases. The message is especially relevant in this current era- that your personal wound is exactly the one you heal in order to teach others the same. She is a 'wounded-healer' teacher of first rank. More than anyone else I have come across, Eden has increased my awareness of the body’s hidden lattice work of energies and kept me on the track of good health.

Many remain unaware, or have only a dim recognition, that these energies exist. What? You can't 'see' them ergo they are not there!! But they are there. One reason we fail to see them might be that in Western medicine the body is regarded as a concrete, solid object, full of discrete parts to be surgically removed when they go wrong. Yet there are many signs of major shift in the perception towards an more subtle organising energy principle like an electromagnetic field, a life force that governs the overall vital health. Kirlian photography shows that heat lines travelling along these meridian lines.

David Feinstein

David Feinstein, her partner, was also presenting, and commented every so often, adding points, sharpening the blurry edges of Donna's explanations. They make a great double act: right and left brain working in a dance of complementary modes. He looks distinguished, tall with grey hair and she obviously loves him being around. In his very ill-fitting suit, he was the left brain, calming and organising, giving the scientific bases underscoring the energy medicine philosophy. Donna was the visual/kinaesthetic, emotional core; wilder and freer- getting it out of sequence in her enthusiasm, having to ask what she was doing in the middle of doing it- but her assistants were there to help her out, yet she was help taking it all in, and did not forget anyone who asked for help. She is the planetary sun in solar system of the Eden family. While, he wore grey, black, purple; she wore bright orange; plum and pink.

Donna certainly delivers. She dealt promptly and effectively with people who had headaches, back aches, breathing problems, chronic fatigue, and even lock jaw. She descrambled people whose energies were not fully integrated, and thus not working at full potential. She was very unplanned, gauging what she would do on the basis of what the audience wanted, fielding questions that went off at every tangent. She would bring anyone who asked a question up on stage. She worked on them directly often with startling effect. Then she would laugh and say, ‘that’s it you’re done now, you are healed, you can go.’ Usually they were ‘fixed,’ at least temporarily, and happy to have received their super ‘hug’ from Donna.

Titanya Eden

Then there was Donna's daughter, Titanya floating around. On first sight, almost a carbon copy of Donna herself, with the same recognisable frizzy-blonde hair, but Titanya has her own unique vibe with her music and quasi-oriental dance moves. Titanya having grown up with Donna has made her own version of energy medicine - energy dance. This involved twining your hands around in figure eights, and shimmying your hips like jelly, needless to say very popular. She is co-authoring a book with her mother on Energy Medicine for children. Yet some, no doubt, would find the eternal grinning off putting thinking Donna can't be this happy ALL the time. But it seems she is. Plus she always tests positive for a hot fudge sundae- her favourtie dessert.

If you have already read the book Energy Medicine (1999) the workshop brings it all to life. She showed how someone with homolateral (not fully integrated energies) reads in front of someone it redirects their energies. She showed how in couples, if one reads strong and the other weak, they have an alternating current effect on each other- the one matching and complementing the other, switching as needed. She showed how the most ‘difficult’ people just had crossed energies which could affect your own. Empathic people with sensitive auras should stay away from Shopping Centres unless they know how to do the Zip Up. Also, if your spleen energy is low you can borrow energy from the Triple Warmer to top it up and vice versa.

I’ll not forget now that Spleen and Triple Warmer are polar opposites, like tides on opposite shores on an ocean, when one is low, the other is high. Interestingly, Caroline Myss herself has written a foreword to the new edition of Energy Medicine, but I think it does not quite do justice to Eden's contribution. It sounds terrible ‘dry’ somehow to say only that Donna provided a 'backbone study' for this field. There is a sternness in Ms Myss, a steely core that is somewhat unflinching. Donna is 'juicy' and full of 'pizazz,' but you'd never guess that from Myss' introduction.

The infectious laughter and puppy-dog grin should not put you off from realising that Donna Eden has achieved a remarkable feat of bringing this intimate knowledge of the body and its energy systems to the attention of the world.One easy way to enjoy an increase in energy is to follow Donna's simple Five-Minute Energy Routine.

Donna signing books

I enjoyed my day with Donna Eden and felt energized by it. She showed us some simple observable phenomena that can be tested by tracing or locking meridians up and down. If you trace a meridian line backwards, people lose energy- which they did. Also, if your energy is scrambled and you have to talk, or teach people, your scrambled energy scrambles theirs and reverses their flow.

We come across people who are like this all the time. These are things we all experience and even sense vividly, but have no other way of explaining except through energy flow and energy medicine has some useful, easy-to-learn techniques to help improve the level of body awareness on the planet.

www.kierondevlin.com

THE POSITIVE IN THE NEGATIVE, Part 2: Extracting the benefit out of anxiety, depression and disappointment

2011-04-10T14:01:00.010+01:00

I had the blues because I had no shoes

until upon the street,

I met a man who had no feet.

Persian Saying

All the contrarians in the world can now rejoice they have found a voice. Dr. Rorem’s theory of the power of the negative thinking is not just alluring, but can be an effective strategy for managing anxiety. As we saw in Part 1 of this article, having positive attitude alone is not sufficient for highly anxious people. There is the ‘defensive pessimism’ a strategy which works where just being positive fails. Even Martin Seligman, the father of the positivity movement acknowledges this.

Martin Seligman

It is also true that genuinely resilient positivity often grows out of a depressive personality, because it started from shaky roots; like Seligman himself, he knows not to go back there. Its strength is tested by experience. It was William James who first said that changing your attitude can change your life, which is still a vital message for angst-ridden people, even though the thought of changing their world view spins them into greater anxiety.

The evidence is still overwhelming that having the grace of hope against all odds is an evolved way to be, ensuring your life will be more tuned-in and successful. According to numerous studies, positive people tend to exceed their performance (www.authentichappiness.com) with positive attitude. But anxious people do much better by using this ‘negative anticipation’ method, in maintaining their paranoia rather than clicking the switch to pronoia or conscious optimism. If you accentuate the positive, that’s what you find in abundance, but fault-finders also find exactly what they seek. Looking on the black side can be addictive. It is the same universe that satisfies both.

From the kernel of painful, traumatic experiences something strong is forged. So is there any point avoiding it or being fearful of the difficult? We feel bad when we don’t get what we want. Oscar Wilde noted that if you don’t get what you want, think of the things you don’t want, that you don’t get. This is a neat compensation trick, requiring some effort of perception. This is what we need to do with disappointment and difficulty - to extract the beneficial juice and somehow alchemically distill the reason why it happened to us.

Soren Kierkegaard

The novel Therapy (1995) by David Lodge is a fine example of how for the character of Tubby - getting fat, losing your hair, getting divorced, becoming impotent, and having a bad knee- can all actually turn out be good for you. Tubby finds that the word ‘dread’ nails his own issue more than ‘anxiety’ which tends to trivialize the feeling. He discovers hidden affinities with Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard. This ‘dread’ suggests that we often fail to ‘coincide’ with ourselves, missing the best of our current life as we focussed on ‘dread.’ Twenty years ago, I read Kierkegaard and it was as electrifying to me then as it is to Tubby to read the words: ‘an unhappy man is always absent to himself, never present.’ But there was more… ‘on the one hand he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering. On the other hand he constantly remembers something he should be hoping for. Consequently, what he hopes for lies behind him and what he remembers lies before him.’

This is unfortunately the condition of many; we fail to be at home to ourselves. We fail to be relaxed in our true nature. We are too busy ‘futurising’ and ‘pasturising’ so to speak, playing the ‘when... then’ game: When I get X, then I’ll feel happy. Oh what a twisted world we inhabit.

Lodge’s Therapy is by turns serious and hilarious. It highlights this paradox: how useful it can be when you suffer agonies and depression to see these experiences as valid, formative and necessary. Shakespeare’s words ring ever true here, ‘the sweet uses of adversity.’ We can in fact reclaim these negative experiences and, like rubbish hawks, recycle discarded stuff found on the waste tip of your life, and creatively put it to good use again.

Jean Rhys

Writer, Jean Rhys, wrote brilliant books, such as Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), but never enjoyed any success from them in her lifetime. She once said that if she could have her life all over again, she would rather have been happy than have been a writer. But, we might ask, can happy people ever be good writers? Is not unhappiness the secret ingredient of good books? It is hard to conceive of a truly happy person wanting to be a writer. The myth would suggest that happy people are too busy being happy to bother writing.So let us hope that Rhys's wish is granted in a happier incarnation now, in which she finds libraries, books and typewriters naturally abhorrent. But perhaps there would not be many interesting books left to read if every writer felt this way?

Other writers swear that their unhappiness is their true muse. Take the pain and sickness away from them and they have nothing left, just an abyss lacking clear purpose or identity. They only write when they are unhappy or because of unease about something. Writing out painful experiences is a form of healing medicine for them. Writing is certainly therapy, as is well documented. It channels one other ‘use’ to which adverse experience can be put. The ultimate goal then might be for the writer to stop writing - making writer’s block, contrarily, a symptom of good mental health, not bad.

During a long period of depression back in the late eighties and mid nineties, I was one of those annoying people who only obsessed about the things that went wrong in my life. Depression is the antithesis of creativity, which requires openness and hope: I had neither. A person is in danger of shutting down totally, which is what I did. It caused me a lot of isolation and heartbreak, not to mention how it must have bothered other people. I used to believe that I was the living king of disappointments, and I wrote about it as a kind of exquisite pain. I had a knack for getting things wrong, for catching life by the knife’s edge and getting hurt. I had breakdowns. I skittered around people never really getting close. I used to fancy, like Kierkegaard, that disappointment was a kind of mistress who courted me, a perverse guardian angel. When I began to use this analogy, it actually made feeling rotten, slightly better for a few minutes, even hours, so it felt good, and I could almost laugh at my clownish antics feeling sorry for myself, my broken relationships, my miserable, unstable mood swings. I was certain that I was destined to be the buffoon, to whom bad stuff adhered like glue. Astonishingly, in the UK, depression affects 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men, so once I began to understand how it worked inside myself, my goal became how to bring any relief possible to those who suffer.

Woody Allen

Along with learning hypnosis, humour was what helped pull me through. Humour provides the subtle key that could twist pain into a belly laugh. This new idea was the key- suddenly seeing the funny side of what happened allowed the emotional pain to shift, and thus subside. Being a miserable sod was really a totally hilarious farce - a nasty joke the universe played at my expense. So why not laugh it out? Tickling the funny bone of depression shifted my point of view. It was like it was happening to someone else. Woody Allen is King of this line in has twisted logic: “More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Humour, hypnosis, and writing have all served a reconstructive purpose for me. Hypnosis delves deep into mind states to unravel knotty problems, and irons out the creases of your psyche. This was all before anyone knew about EFT Emotional Freedom Technique - which is another nifty technique. Many issues rooted largely in 'fear' 'dread' and 'anxiety,' respond quickly and well to tapping directly on the energy body, which, like healing writing, triggers both right and left brain to refresh inspiration. You reconnect with the muse. Simple emotional acupuncture can often provoke multiple viewpoints. We begin to see the other sides of a problem and from that vantage point, it soon ceases to bother you. Other more complex and subtle problems tend to float up for your edification once the big ones are knocked on the head. But I have always found that recommend writing out problems works incredibly well too. The more complex and horrific the feelings, the more benefit you gain from writing each tangled strand of the turmoil out on paper or on a computer screen.

Make of this what you will, but it is the strategy of unhappy people the world over to forget to feel the fresh air on your face on their way to the Tube station. They are so busy spinning scenarios of what was and what could be, they miss where they are right now - where everything is usually pretty much okay mate. This is the self-created bubble some people live in; yet they wonder why they suffer. Try to pop this illusion, push them out of their comfort zone and they become incredibly upset, even fighting to keep it. We often feel locked in a complex sense of reality that loves to feel the pain of dis-contentedness. The neurotic state can make pain seem like joy, making some people happy being unhappy perhaps? This too might be an as yet uncharted great survival strategy in the making. Ultimately, it is an incomplete picture of who we are.

From the standpoint of hypnotherapy one size certainly does not fit all. Positive attitude alone does not always solve the problem. The therapist has to be extremely flexible, adapting a variety of techniques to suit the idiosyncrasies of the client. What’s negative to some is positive to others and vice versa. Anything that ‘works’ for clients, however odd, or irrational, is usually there for a reason at that point in their lives. Yet, most who come for help are simply not happy with their current mental landscape and need help controlling what they think about that. What we think determines how we feel.

Control of thoughts is essential yet so difficult for a lot of people. We have unconscious beliefs. People with performance anxiety for example tend to run this ‘constructive pessimism’ strategy, as Rorem suggests, so perhaps it's manageable. Yet, they can go on imagining terrible things over and over and are locked in that pattern.

In the end we all have to decide what we want to feel. The mind controls it all; we decide we feel happy or unhappy, pissed off or frustrated. Bad things happen. This gives us access to is our personal alchemy, our magic of wringing the honey and ‘sweet uses’ out of repeated anxiety, depression and disappointment. We should not ignore suffering or the patterns that dog us or weaken us, but we do get to decide exactly how we want to cope with it by whatever means works for us.

http://www.kierondevlin.com

To Read Part 1 of this Article, The Positive in the Negative Click Here

Max Strom: A LIfe Worth Breathing

2011-02-13T17:37:00.007Z

Max Strom: A Life Worth Breathing: A Yoga Master’s Handbook of Strength, Grace and Healing

The Tao is the breath that never dies

Tao Te Ching

Skyhorse Publishing, 2010

We may think we know how to breathe already. Think again. Perhaps there is an inch more oxygen to be inhaled by expanding your lung power? Attending a Max Strom class with my wintry chest cough, I felt I would not be able to get through it, but he taught me how to enlarge my lung capacity, and it was just the thing I needed. Fuller expansive chest breathing gives us more energy as it is literally the spirit and soul of life. In many languages the root of the words ‘breath’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is the same.Hence the title of this book. Life is definitely worth breathing some more.

We can all breathe, but often we do not know how to do it fully and consciously. Once we realise however, that the body contains and stores emotions like grief and anger, and that the breath controls this, then healing can begin. Strom’s message is - Breathe More and watch this healing evolve. He has a deep, mellifluous tone, which comes from a source deep inside him and I can almost hear him say the words on the page: people are scared of breathing deeply because they are scared of their emotions.

Strom shows that even to know simple things about yoga can help us to integrate different elements of our personality. It does not have to be esoteric. You don’t have to be able to wrap your legs around your neck to be enlightened. Flexible does not equal spiritual.

Many great saints actually had stiff necks or legs. They were not nimble-footed when old, but walked like broken robots, spine bent, or not at all, as unfortunately many elderly people do. The most dangerous place for the over sixties in the USA is the bedroom and the bathroom where falls occur that can be fatal. Flexibility could help maintain a healthier, longer life. Similarly, people who are incredibly flexible, able to do the most gymnastic of poses, can still be thinking what's for dinner, or how much they hate the grouchy person next to them on the bus.

Max Strom is a kind of teacher’s teacher. He has that something ‘extra’, a deeper understanding, a balanced tone, a sharp intellect, a kindness towards those who struggle to learn, such as the over 60s, who have little coordination or balance. This may be because of his own personal struggles with pain- his clubbed feet, but he quickly realised aged 15, after starting with Chi Gong, and Chinese yoga, that yoga is transformational, and catches you for life.

I still can’t do the full wheel – it’s like hitting a wall every time I try. Deeper chest breathing could help it to eventually happen. His inclination, both in the book and in his classes, is to be calm and explain things in a way that seems simple, yet lucid, fresh and illuminating. So, the real change are not in being able to do the Side Crow, or Peacock pose, but in opening up as a person to the world around you; seeing the world differently with the ‘ears’ and the ‘eyes’ of an open heart.

It seems a lot for yoga to manage to be able to do all of this. Yet it is deceptive. It is a big mistake to confuse ‘yoga’ with a lightweight work out session, or think it involves doing asanas (physical postures) only. The physical positions are only one of the eight limbs of yoga. Other branches are Pranayama (breathing) and Samyama which is the combined simultaneous practice of Dharana (concentration, intent), Dhyana, (contemplation) and Samadhi (unity). These are words he rarely uses as they tend to scare off beginners who don't like mystical claptrap. But these deeper approaches to yoga help us respond to dilemmas, connect to the world through focused attention, deeper breathing which leads us to be more present in any moment. And that can't be a bad thing

Strom’s words are so apt here: to the outside observer, looking through the window of a yoga class, it is just a bunch of people stretching hamstrings, nothing more. If an illiterate person watches someone reading a book, all they see is a person with their head in pages filled with black indecipherable squiggles on. They cannot fathom the possible impact of reading, even less gauge if that person happens to be reading a life-changing novel.

We live in a market driven culture that puts premium emphasis on physical health, often overlooking the emotional and psychological issues that underpin illness. Through yogic breathing our nervous system becomes more relaxed and open to giving us heightened experiences. This is what yoga does for us. It can heal emotional complexes like depression – it can also make you look fitter and be more confident, and have a sexier butt, but the sexy butt is not the goal- just the bonus. All sensory and positive experiences are enhanced.

Yoga has to be experienced to be known fully. People come to yoga to heal their back pains, their dodgy knees, and it helps them, but what keeps them coming back for more is that it heals their lives too.

This book could help trigger your desire to breathe and connect to the world in fuller, more satisfying ways. It is that simple. It is full of graceful, healing thoughts which linger in the mind just like the impression the man himself makes. It is a book worth reading for that alone.

Kieron Devlin

www.kierondevlin.com

The Waves

2011-01-10T10:07:00.004Z

Here is a new hypnosis video which uses footage of the sea in Kovalam, Kerala. With background music gratefully acknowledged by Craig Pruess, the Ganesha invocation from the Sacred Chants of Devi.

The quote is from Virgil 'We Make our Destinies by our Choice of Gods'- a favourite of mine and Robert Ohotto's. So it's been on my mind for a while. The question is of course, if thoughts become reality, 'Whose gods are yours?' Which enculturation/indoctrination do we follow. Thoughts are embedded and often very unconscious. Often beliefs are largely unquestioned and largely Judaeo/Christian? Perhaps we should ask and examine these in order to get free of some that are no longer working well for us in today's world and turbulent economy.

The WAVES

It is also a reflection on waves and partly inspired by a quote from the Virginia Woolf book 'The Waves' which is really a prose poem, where the voices ask the stars to 'Consume me'. I just changed it to 'waves', consume me and set me free of the past'.

If you follow the instructions given at the bottom of the video and enter into a light trance, this relaxation feeling is worth practising at any time of day and can be repeated whenever you wish.

During the trance watching the waves fall on the shore, you are encouraged to make a statement of intent, your 'san kalpa' or deep intention, engraving it into the sand and seeing the waves cannot wash this away though everything else comes and goes like a thought on the shore of your mind. If you are not ready the first time; try it a second or third time so you can hold your mind still and firm.

Believe fully that your intention will stick like glue. And it will. Simply because you are addressing a deeper level of mind and sending a firm instruction it is bound to follow.

Hope you find it useful for reconnecting to your true desires for 2011.

Health and Happiness, Peace and Love to all.

Kieron

The Art of Losing.... One Art by Elisabeth Bishop

2010-09-20T22:30:00.001+01:00

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elisabeth Bishop

From Poets.org

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. A

How Music Heals Bodies and Minds: A Waltz on the Sublime Side

2010-09-05T19:40:00.016+01:00

Duke Orsino:

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Twelfth Night Act 1, scene 1, 1–3

Last week I went to the Proms with a friend. We perched high above the Albert Hall stage from the gallery looking down on the heads of the Minnesota Orchestra percussionists and the BBC Symphony Choir. The visceral thrill of this surging, pulsating music of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 – The Ode to Joyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven- had everyone transfixed- and tapping out the rhythms as Beethoven himself did at its premiere in Vienna, 1824. We experienced something larger than life, masterful, moving and euphoric - a definitive last statement on what a truly ‘great’ symphony ought to be. But the tapping got me thinking- how it is that music elates people this way?

Ludwig van Beethoven

In popular culture, Beethoven’s music is forever fused with a personal experience of bliss. In the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971) Alex, the crazy droog, says of Beethoven: Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures! It’s easy to see what he means – the rest of us struggle inarticulately to express it, ending up with the word ‘sublime’ –which is still somehow inadequate.

In Search of the Sublime

While memories of that film can be attributed as much to Rossini’s ‘Thieving Magpie’ as to Beethoven’s Ninth, it was amazing to think that this incredible symphonic music came from the heart of a completely deaf person. If a deaf person can hear this symphony internally, I wonder what the rest of us, with fully functioning ears, are missing out on? When it was over, we agreed that this music really ‘lifts you out of the mundane.’ Yet, not every piece of music or art can do this. So what makes this different? How exactly does music transport us out of the ordinary self and into a lather of joy?

E. T. A. Hoffmann, the author and music critic found that only the concept of the ‘sublime’ could express what Beethoven delivers. This notion was at the heart of Romanticism. Beethoven was to Hoffman, the sublimest of composers. Not only does his music induce ‘terror, fright, horror and pain’, it also ‘awakens that endless longing which is the essence of romanticism.’ Plus, it ‘opens the realm of the colossal and immeasurable,’ and ‘leads the listener away into the wonderful spiritual realm of the infinite.’ Think he means that ‘shivers-down-the-spine’ moment in the presence of something beyond our small selves. The Ninth has it in spades: the shuddering, chugging repetitions, the surprising, yet satisfying contrasts, the sudden chord shifts, the sheer immensity of the conception, the logic of the development towards its grand finale. You don’t need flying shoulders to bolster your altitude with this music- it hits the high water mark, bang on.

Music Boosts your Immune System

It is no surprise then that music can be used as your own ‘happy trigger,’ a kind of euphoria stimulator. It is another healer, like any art form. At the very least, it leaves you feeling pretty good, but it can even boost your immunity. It is personal what will work: what one loves another detests with a vengeance. So, choose wisely. Beethoven doesn’t always soothe you - the Ninth Symphony thrusts you on a roller coaster ride. It does, however, stimulate the ‘feel good’ centres of the brain, close to ‘food’ and ‘sex’ ‘chocolate’ and ‘chilli’, as studies at McGill University, Montreal have shown. In these stressed-out times, these are the happy buttons we need to press more often, so they can light up our lives. Let music, as Shakespeare says, be your ‘mind’ food- but then remember - we are what we eat.

The ‘Not-Just’ Mozart Effect

Einstein loved his Mozart - it helped him to think more creatively. Some argue that Mozart has overtaken Beethoven as the world’s most adored classical star composer, but I would say, what about Bach? Vivaldi? Monteverdi? Chopin? Wagner? Just name your own. It should not matter who is tops. It doesn’t have to be classical either to move you. People can reach it copying dance moves from a Britney Spears or Rihanna video. It could be hard rock, electronica, trance dance, even punk, though ‘rock’ is said to increase the appetite, and classical reduce it. Music has even been used in psychotherapy to treat different diseases, and mental disorders, not far off what was intended for Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Some Tube Stations in South London, classical music is piped through the PA system, perhaps to offset rising public discontent. Shops have known this secret for years. In Don Campbell’s The Mozart Effect (1997), it proposed that fifteen minutes of Mozart was alleged to influence and improve intelligence, memory, cognitive, spatial abilities and word recall. This is said to work whether you like classical music or not. While I’m sure Mozart works a treat, Beethoven might be brought in when big guns are needed - or to reach the parts other musicians can’t.

Music has been used to treat autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and even epilepsy. Specific compositions, and even movements, are known to be effective with different illnesses. Music by Scarlatti, Corelli, Telleman and Albinoni are good for clarity of mind; Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries are good for releasing anger. Let despair trouble you no longer; just immerse yourself in a few Beethoven symphonies, especially Symphony number 5, parts 3 and 4; the Pastoral No 6, parts 4 and 5; and the unmissable Symphony Number 9 grand finale, which, based on Schiller’s poem, helps to worship at the altar of Joy. Fully engaged listening can help trigger your new neural network designed just for joy instead of the one that leads to depression. Bulgarian psychologist, Georgi Lozanov did much the same with his theory of Suggestopedia, a technique of enhancing learning, which is about attitude not aptitude, by utilising background music to create positive moods. It has been used in classrooms now for decades.

Don’t even imagine either that this is all new-fangled science and can be dismissed easily - knowledge of the healing powers of music goes way back to the first mystery schools of Pythagoras and Iambilichus. Shamans from many cultures have always known how certain sounds resonate and are able to heal.

Making your own Music

Even so, some critics have scoffed at the original tests that proved the Mozart Effect and spotted the flaws. It could have been other things that boosted intelligence, not the music, they suggested. Further testing and research was not conclusive. However, it did prove that actually playing music by far has the most ‘measurable’ effect. Thanks to brain mapping and imaging, we can pinpoint larger areas of grey matter in musicians than in non-musicians. It resides in the right auditory cortex. Practising chords and pulling a bow across strings flexes a muscle in the brain others might leave unused. Long term practice may have an impact on intelligence.

We should conclude then that to make your own music is better than listening to it. Yet, If brain rehearsal theory is valid, then just watching someone play the violin might have impact. If you act out all the movements as well, it might give you a similar effect as playing it? This is good news for the non-musicians among us. This is a concept of 'acting out' used a lot in hypnosis. Thinking makes it so, and many difficult issues are resolved by brain rehearsal in everyday trance. It is also a way of making your own sweet music so you can dance to a different tune, and make relevant and lasting changes in your life.

How to Make Music Work For You

Here are some tips for getting closer to music, for expanding its impact in your world:

Prepare to listen by removing surrounding clutter- free up space.
Sit very quietly and still so as to ‘receive’ the music.
Lose yourself in the music; become absorbed in it totally.
Drum away on the balustrade or kitchen table by all means-even hum along ( just not during a public performance please).

Switch lights off to darkness when listening and imagine being blind. What does the music make you see?

Watch music performance on TV on ‘mute’ - TV performance with the sound off and imagine being deaf. What do the images make you hear?
Watch the orchestra conductor’s movements and copy- act them out. You’ve seen Heavy Metal air-guitar players do it. How does it feel?
Tap out the rhythm on your fingers - nice bit of emotional acupuncture here, like EFT, attuning to the vibration
Imagine being the composer. What would you do differently?
Have fun

The Four Last Songs by Strauss

Richard Strauss

Tonight I’m listening to one of my favourites- the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss sung by Finnish soprano, Marita Katilla, again at the Proms. It’s the Berlin Philharmonika conducted by Simon Rattle. It is top class - not bad for only £5 at ticket. I’m not a classical musician, but you don’t have to be to fully appreciate this exquisite floating, nostalgic, poignant composition. It sends its own supremely contemplative message melting from the beyond back into life. Beethoven himself said, ‘music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.’ I suspect that he was just telling it like it is. Philosophy is a tangled mess - both compromised and constipated by the limitations of language. Music leaves words way behind. Yet the combined fusion of word and music, like oxygen feeds fire, magnifies the impact.

The Four Last Songs do this blending of orchestra and singer perfectly. They are meditations on mortality from the poems of Hermann Hesse who was anticipating his own death, in the third one, Belm Shlafengehen:

                     And my unfettered soul
                    wishes to soar up freely
                   into night's magic sphere
                  to live there deeply and thousandfold.

My tastes are so catholic they go beyond any are tribal allegiances to particular genres; there are dozens of moods that elate and excite; this happens to be just one; but to my untrained ear Strauss captured something vibrant and magical; these songs come close to expressing an almost inexpressible feeling, of longing for death, of greeting it kindly, calmly, even cheerfully - and we all may need that.

Let us hope that with the help of Beethoven, Strauss, or other music of our choice, we are gracious enough to do likewise when we reach that moment.

How to be positive while still being negative: The positive power of negative thinking: Part 1

2010-08-20T10:09:00.010+01:00

Not everyone believes in a one-size-fits-all Smiley face universe. Some have a strategy of focusing on all the terrible things that might happen in order to make it turn out good. Their logic goes: if I think of the worst before it happens, it will prevent it happening. Therefore, the goal is good, and it is what saves them. Only the method is a bit twisted.

For me, thinking the worst just leads to the bad being amplified to the power of ten; yet, in theory, the principle of harping on the negative might have something going for it, if practised with skill. I have encountered people who swear by their lives does work for them. It’s worth the benefit of a little doubt, if only to glean whatever insight there is to be had.

There are many facets to consider before you decide which side of the positive/negative spectrum you fall. The first being that supposing that there is only a positive-negative binary opposite can distort the clarity of the picture. After all we know that within pain-pleasure, good-bad, male-female spectrums, there are also many shades of grey. These word opposites are clumsy, but for now language is the most convenient tool.

Positive-Power-Negative-Thinking

Let’s say for the sake of argument, that you can be a right old contrarian to your heart’s content. It could even be fun. Growing old always seemed to confer the right to be as cantankerous and bloody-minded as ‘nan’, the cockney granny in the Catherine Tate show. But young people too can be elegant contrarians. According to Dr. Rorem, author of The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (2001), this method of visualising that you’ll go blank in an important presentation, that if you get on a plane, it is bound to fall out of the sky, is a ‘defensive pessimism.’ Most people recognise this feeling, but just how constructive is it? Rorem suggests that it is a valuable adaptive mechanism.

If you feel you are one of those people, a genuine contrarian, then you will well know what agony of fun it is to resist the tide, and go against others and visualize the worst. Let the positive types be as foolish as they like, blithely ignoring what could go wrong. If you are not sure where you stand, you can take Rorem’s QUIZ to find out your score.

At least this approach does not try deny that the anxiety is there, or go into an orgy of ‘you damn well should be positive’ and ‘thou shalt be upbeat’. It might just be an idiosyncratic personalized protection strategy. But I wonder how effective it is at unlocking people from their imaginary shells. Neuroses come in different coloured packages- this one is marked ‘ultra safe’.

Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley

It is true that too much of a good thing can be wonderful, it can also be a bore. Aldous Huxley warned in Brave New World (1932) that a culture that tries to impose happiness on everyone is doomed to cause havoc. If the search for happiness is based merely on aversion to pain and blindsides diversity and variety of feeling, it can eliminate what it means to be human. Not that this would stop the let’s-all-be happy brigade from trying.

Being able to see the positive in the negative might strike some as absurd and even a dead end. Yet, it is a valuable skill if we can be bothered to learn it. It helps here to attempt to understand the principles of the Tao. If the world is divided into contrary but complementary elements: Yin, the receptive, and Yang, the active, each element contains and embraces its opposite, while forming a third energy. The world is interface between the extremes which oscillate and integrate back and forth. They are there for a reason. Seasons and cycles alternate, you wait long enough, the opposite aspect becomes prominent. It's a self balancing, self correcting system.

That’s why, though often overlooked, being patient can prove successful in the long run. Wanting what you want when you want, can cause suffering. Yet suffering is a vital part of the picture, helping us to understand what it is to be alive. So too with the negative and the positive attitudes. The negative then is the positive in waiting, the positive, the negative is ready to burst through. We need them both to survive and enjoy 'difference'.

However, I would say that if strategic pessimists were in control, designing our utopia, they would as in Brave New World have us all inhabit their hell, without a glimmer of the good stuff. This drive to be negative tendency can easily rationalize the behaviour, entrenching them in the habit of feeling unhappy because separate from the world. I for one would join the happy brigade in a negative dystopia.

In a recent interview, writer Adam Haslett, an American who was brought up in Oxford, said that, ‘in the USA, I’m a pessimist among optimists, but in the UK, I’m an optimist among pessimists.’ Having lived in both countries I have to agree. By rights I should belong somewhere in the mid Atlantic. The attitude you have can place you in between the usual. The spectacles you wear are relative to your social conditioning. British people could do with daily doses of positivity and, for Americans, a dollop of pessimism now and again to temper their Pollyannaish behaviour wouldn’t go amiss. Funnily enough, it was an American, Ambrose Bierce, who penned the most scathing definition of optimism as ‘the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.’ People like Bierce were probably the leading constructive pessimists of their day by Rorem's definition.

Ultimately, whether we are pessimists looking only for the difficulty in every opportunity, or optimists looking for opportunity in every difficulty should not matter at all, as long as we oscillate enough to appreciate the variety in it all.

There is so much more to say on this topic. In Part 2 of this post, we'll delve even deeper into the role of therapy, dark humour, and the brilliant uses to which unhealthy disappointment can be put.

Kieron

www.kierondevlin.com

Please feel free to join my new Facebook Page: Healing Through Writing
for news about workshops.

How Trauma is Released Through Art: Roman Cieslewicz Posters Retrospective

2010-08-10T19:54:00.006+01:00

Roman Cieslewicz

The Healing Power of Posters by Roman Cieslewicz, a Retrospective, Royal College of Art, organised by the Polish Cultural Institute.

If anyone needs evidence that art can heal old wounds – the theme of this blog – all they have to do is look at a few film posters.

Who would have believed that posters helped people, perhaps even an entire nation, Poland, to adjust to their overlords, the Soviet Union, in the last few decades of the 20^th century?

Roman Cieslewicz (1930-1996) was an artist with a steadfast vision who combined visual wit with stark disturbing imagery that transfused angst into eloquent visual communication. His skill juxtaposing images, words in startling combinations, using a simple cut and paste collage technique is extraordinary. Even today we might look twice at these memorable, even scary designs. It does not surprise me to find that these images expressed people's innermost conflicts and feelings. So, while his work teeters on the edge of disturbing, nightmarishly surreal, it is also revelatory, with hints of grim humour.

Roman Cieslewicz

Karl Gustav Jung had great foresight in putting art at the centre of psychotherapy which was highly unusual at the time - the early 1920s - yet his understanding of art has since borne great fruit, spawning the field of art therapy. One of Jung's key ideas was that it is the power of the unreconstructed image alone that heals. That it simply appears in your mind at any given point of your life should be honoured. That is its visual language. Whether it morphs or not after that is immaterial. The image resonates like sounds vibrate.

Roman Cieslewicz

Some might argue that harping on images of conflict, pain and trauma, the split self, opens itself up accusations of obesesing with the negative. These are after all the materials thrown up by the dark recesses of our minds. I would say that if it's done badly, perhaps, but, ultimately: great art is never depressing. Quite the opposite, it is cathartic and quite good for us, like a lot of things we don't like. It is also what you do with it that counts.Cieslewicz also used a mirroring technique but his posters seem to well up with a self conscious dream like quality that echoes Surrealism. Should we therefore look away or look more closely to come to terms with the uncomfortable? Is it better to paint pretty flowers and trees or paint the otherwise inexpressible stuff that constitutes the the psychodrama of self? I think you know the answer. Both are needed.

Roman Cieslewicz

This exhibition of posters at the Royal College of Art is a reminder that some artists characterize an attitude of grim survival which seems very 20^th century to us now, although we are still not free of oppressors. Poland was under Soviet rule when Cieselewicz did his early work. Later, in Paris, his work exhibited a more sophisticated Pop Art element. These posters demonstrate the livid, torn, and mirrored faces. His poster for Dziady (1967) a play with political overtones at the national theatre, expressed the profound pain and anguish of a repressed people. Thus a sub text emerged. The image of an encrusted man with his heart and soul frazzled to the empty core came to stand for David versus Goliath - Poland against the Soviet Regime. People knew what it meant deep down.

Roman Cieslewicz

The need to understand why disturbing work is necessary is still relevant today. We are still in need of imagery that sublimates both inner and outer conflict. To overlook art's purgative function might just be throwing out baby with bath water.

That great art is cathartic goes some way to explaining why we love to see tragedies played out over and over in Operas and great dramatic plays like Hamlet and MacBeth. In seeing that the fates of opposed characters can be locked in battle in such a way that the inevitable happens follows a logic way beyond just being nice. The resulting work, the dramatic clash can ennoble and enhance our knowledge of who we are. To turn away from what scares us dooms us to forever repeat it.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, the proper way to view art was like the ancient Greeks who transformed disease into great beneficial forces. Their secret was to honour illness like a god.

‘Art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror and absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live’. ( The Birth of Tragedy)

Roman Cieslewicz

Many recent exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection have given witness too show that it is people on the edge who are possibly in the greatest need of art as the transformational tool. Yes, it creates powerful emotions and those are difficult to handle, yet, strange to say, it is by nailing the images that obsess and confuse the mind that we can become free of the troubling emotions.

This is true of all the arts from words to music. We have at our disposal the tool to transform our scary bits, reintegrating their scattered fragments back into a semblance of order and meaning.

It is this profusion that heals.. Art is the soul’s medicine.

Roman Cieslewicz

ROMAN CIESLEWICZ POSTERS
16 July - 17 August
MON-SAT 11am - 7 pm

Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU
FREE

Kieron Devlin

www.kierondevlin.com

Next Healing Through Writing Workshop, Weds, October 27th at Moving Arts Base, Islington, N1

Followers for Algernon: Hypnotic Stories of Mystery and Awe

2010-07-17T16:21:00.018+01:00

A candlelit reading of Algernon Blackwood Stories at Treadwells Book shop 15th July

Writers become forgotten when their work is misunderstood or misread or when tastes shift towards more obvious styles. But times also change, and we reassess the value of an author's unique contribution. There is a compelling case for rediscovering the work of Algernon Blackwood (1869- 1951) author of supernatural tales and undisputed master of the spectral atmosphere.

Blackwood’s appeal is not easy to pin down. His work is uneven; he didn’t write obvious schlock horror; there no things that go bump in the night, no head swirling demon possessions, not a droplet of blood and gore; his work is a million miles away from Nightmare on Elm Street; yet it is intriguing and infinitely more suggestive of other worldliness than other writers. His style is closer to the mystical, elemental and transcendental. It is not plain horror then, or fantasy, but somewhere between, in the domain of mystery and imagination. Perhaps it is exactly because modern audiences have become so weary of having fears cynically manipulated by horror writers and filmmakers that Blackwood now seems so fresh and untainted by formulaic shocks in eerie darkened corners. All the same elements are there, but his style is thankfully too subtle and multi-dimensional to ever be given the ‘shudder mongering’ Hollywood treatment, though shudders there are a plenty.

So this reading of excerpts from Blackwood stories by Mike Daviot at Treadwell’s (15/7/10) was a timely reminder to me of a talent for delivering word by word a hypnotic reading trance that allows us to feel spine-tingling awe and sense of mystery. Christine Oakley-Harrington who runs the shop has done a fine job of bringing these half-forgotten authors to a new public. The location was the haunted basement below the shop. Christine said if anyone present could determine that the ghosts had gone, she’d love to know. Nothing visible showed up during the reading, alas, at least nothing that was able to swallow the candle smoke or make any noises. Daviot luckily had artificial light to help him read, and there was noise enough from the street, but I fancy any spirits present were listening to Blackwood's tales just as we were.

Daviot read well, I thought, much better than some of the Libri Vox public recordings online which often sound dry and wooden.He gave each phrase's nuance its due, achieving a clear tone. He added snippets of Blackwood's biography to well chosen excerpts. He is not writing a book on Blackwood, but I suggested later that he might. He read passages from The Centaur (1911) about O'Malley who was an alter ego of Blackwood himself, following the call of the wild in his nature, seeing through the veil of nature on a trip to the Caucasus Mountains. Take this passage for example....

For the moods of Nature flamed through him-- in him --like presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by a spiritual remoteness from their mood... (The Centaur,1911).

Daviot also read from The Psychical Invasion (1908) which was the spookiest tale about Dr.John Silence, psychic detective. The detective sits in a haunted room with Smoke his cat, and Flame, his dog. Both pets can see a creeping malevolent presence, and begin to go frantic, but the psychic physician cannot see anything initially.Then he is challenged to the very essence of his soul, but finds a way to overcome it. Silence was based on characters Blackwood met while he was in the Golden Dawn, yet the occult theme is tastefully drawn.

So where do you start the process of rediscovering this writer? There are dozens of stories. Most begin by reading stories such as The Willows (1907) and The Wendigo (1910) but there are many other stories that deserve attention. Luckily much is available online that might otherwise have gone out of print. While Blackwood sometimes blunders with remarks typical of the age, and even piles on details, he has continued to be included in major Horror and Supernatural anthologies, and is even regarded as a core influence on H.P. Lovecraft, it is fascinating to spot how prescient Blackwood was about subtle layers of consciousness a hundred years ago and how consistently he refers to this in his work.

It is worth noting the eco-mystical strain that also suffuses stories such as The Man Whom the Trees Loved (1912). Trees become so actively alive that they threaten to take over an old couple's life. From the 21st century, we can understand how odd these views must have seemed to the Victorian era. We can see how much more vital this has become to be sensitively attuned to wind and woods, grass, trees, to the interconnecting consciousness that is a living organism. Gaia- that the earth is a self-correcting intelligent 'whole' organism is a theory now mostly accepted by world’s leading scientists. In novels such as The Human Chord (1910) The Bright Messenger (1921) he explored these and other notions, often peering way ahead of his time.

When Mike Ashley decided to write a biography Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life (2001) he found that Mr. Blackwood, an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where his motto was Umbra Fugat Veritas - truth flees from the shadows- could blend into the background like a whiff of pale smoke. In fact, that’s exactly what he did on one of the first TV shows in 1949. His last John Silence story A Victim of Higher Space (1917) alludes to this ability. While Blackwood had friends such as W.B.Yeats, H.G.Wells, Hillaire Belloc, Edward Elgar, and many others, he was hardly ever mentioned by any of them. Most, if not all, records of him had vanished. Even in photographs or reports made for the government, he seemed to have stepped mysteriously into the background. He was a mystery man. His style reflects that perfectly, and who better than H.P. Lovecraft to divine the secret of Blackwood’s methodical style:

no one even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere…(H.P. Lovecraft, Favourite Weird Tales,1930)

Followers for Algernon are sure to be on the increase: just pick up any story – Mike Daviot recommended us The Doll (1946 ) on which many other ‘doll’ stories are founded, for starters, and just read on…and slowly allow the atmosphere to creep upon you unawares. He really does ‘glamour’ the reader, the way True Blood vampires can ‘glamour’ mere mortals and we go along for the ride as the effect is alluring, tapping into elemental energies which are ultimately magical.

Kieron Devlin

www.kierondevlin.com

Devendra Banhart, at Koko, Camden

2010-07-07T16:51:00.015+01:00

Catch my video of Devendra Banhart here singing 'Bad Girl' at Koko, Camden, July 4th London, a winning performance, showing his mellow wistful side. But it seems there are multiple facets to Devendra.

Is there any style he cannot do? Soft and Hard Rock, Folk, Jazz, Reggae, Ska, Accapella parody, acoustic, solo on piano, falsettos and warbles like Bolan though he's toned down the Bolanesque throat warble these days. Big highlights were when he sang two of my favourites: 'Seahorse' and ' Rats'.

He showed off -but in a nice way- this beguiling eclecticism and versatility. This guy can sing, rap, play, curse, kiss the audience AND tune his guitar all at the same time, plus he has a great line in witty banter ( I wanna feel the heat with somebody + Boom there it is) aimed directly at the heart of the audience. He even sang a surprise bonus - a rollicking version of Taylor Dayne's 'Tell it to my Heart'...'wanna feel my body rock.Tell me I’m the only one. Is this really love or just a game? Tell it to my heart. I can feel my body rock every time you call my name. ' Funny how there was not one person in the house who didn't know ALL the words to this song.

Thus it was that Devendra rocked Koko; he delivered the goods- with star plusses. But his quirky songs with weird quasi mystical lyrics are what endears him to us; as if he alone is in touch with the multi-verse,and this is what makes grown men in the audience shout out 'I love you Devendra' without a trace of embarrassment, drowning out girls shouting 'I want your baby'.

What a humble chap too for one so talented. Smiling and patting his band mates on the back,even singing their songs. He praised the support act Rozi Plain from the 'bottom' of his heart, threw his body at the audience for multiple groping, and even invited some random guy up from the audience to play his own song- the bigger surprise was that it was damned good. The guy was called Bert? He took Devendra’s guitar and played ‘I Love My Tortoise’, a soft acoustic Devendra-like piece of whimsy. Surely it was all staged? The line that got me as ‘ I love you, but you’re not good for me.. This was more Syd Barrett than Devendra, if not a real Syd Barrett song.

Devendra thundered back on stage and encored with a medley of ' I Feel Just like a Child' and 'Chinese Children' and, for that moment, we were all Devendra's 'wild- child' offspring.

I for one will be always eager to know what he gets up to next.

Kieron

www.kierondevlin.com

How to have Out of the Body Experience: William Buhlman OBE workshop, Italy

2010-06-13T11:08:00.042+01:00

''Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out.

Greet yourself in a thousand other forms

as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home.''

Hafiz

William Buhlman is one of the best known names in the world of OBEs (Out of Body Experiences). He's a pioneer in the field, and good at teaching the skill to others. So, to be at one of his workshops was fantastic - it allowed me to ask all the questions I wanted directly to the man himself. He doesn't often come to the UK- last time was six years ago - and he has no immediately plans to come here in the near future. He does however go to Italy, saying he resonates particularly with Rome, and possible past lives there. This workshop was at Le Querce Bianche near Treviso. .

Buhlman utilizes hypnosis to maximum effect, achieving a very deep level of relaxation, bordering sleep. This assists people to move smoothly into altered states of mind- the fertile platform for triggering OBES. His workshop activates all the ideas contained in his books 'Adventures Beyond the Body' and 'Secrets of the Soul' "are probably the most accesible accounts of non-physical experience available to date. Millions of people have had OBEs and NDEs ( Near Death Experiences) but a good number of people misinterpret their meaning.

What's good about these books is that they are not just based on his personal experience though 'Adventures' is drawn from his own OBE journals, but they rest on massive research. The number of people responding to Buhlman's OBE survey has now topped 20,ooo! Respondees come from all over the world; the results showing that OBEs are a universal phenomena, irrespective of age, gender, class, religion or belief system.

On a personal level Buhlman shines. He's modest and committed- a great teacher who manages to make complex ideas simple without triviaizing their depth. Lucid and grounded, he stands tall and fit at age 60, and speaks straight from the heart, obviously passionate about his subject.

What you learn from his is that the biggest barrier to exploring beyond the body is our own fear. Developing a strong, flexible mindset, he believes, is probably the most important factor in achieving successful OBEs, allowing the mind to then open up to weird and wonderful inner dimensions. A good out of the body explorer is:

courageous
adventurous
fearless
open
goal-oriented
objective in recording experiences thoroughly

The tendency of some people during OBE practice is to be fearful that what's happening to them isn't 'normal.' Buhlman was great at calming such fears and clarifying that ' There are NO RULES -----Except to keep away from your body once you're out.' Anything goes because we are individuals and one OBE size definitely does not fit all. Different experiences just add to the richness and variety of OBEs. Letting go of emotional baggage, giving up analyzing, and dissolving fearful thinking can have benefits in any area of life, but when confronting the great mysteries of life beyond death, these actions have increased impact. It frees up energy to be able to shift dimensions more freely.

Most are afraid they won't be able to reconnect with their bodies, but to Buhlman, this is what keeps people trapped. They need to 'break the mould'. He has this amazing sense of courage to explore. He never fears alien entities, or malicious spirits, or possessions, as he says 'we are the most powerful creators in the universe.' It is our own minds that create the fears and phantoms in the first place. It is important to recognise this, and it is up to us to just take command. This kind of talk has made him an inspiration. He's working at the frontiers of consciousness, an explorer who challenges all the received and conventional notions of what is supposed to happen when we die.

He used his own hemi-sync style music to lead us into trance states, bordering sleep. Several key techniques were then introduced, including one from the Golden Dawn, and an ancient Peruvian Shaman Fire Ceremony where objects symbolizing habits were burned in solemn silence.

Over lunch, I talked to him about the few advanced I'd made with Todd Rout's workshops; also at discovering Jurgen Ziewe, author of Multi Dimensional Man who says that OBEs can be accessed through meditation. I said I'd used a lot of OBE techniques for a while, but still could not tell whether I was really out of body or not. Buhlman's view was characteristically direct: in workshops there is always an 'aura overlap', which could act as interference, so it was better to be in the secluded, individualized cabins at the Munroe Institute. He jested with me that in a difficult case like mine, I might need to be 'hit out with a hammer'. If so, Buhlman was definitely the hammer I needed- I could easily imagine him blowing things out of the water.

Paradoxically, being 'out' whether slipping out, or being knocked- Buhlman reminded us is a misunderstanding of the nature of OBEs. There is no 'out in terms of the higher consciousness- just as there is no 'up' or 'down' or linear time. The higher self is beyond such categories and measurements required by the physical dimension self. An OBE (a term that seems to have stuck) is really more of a transition of consciousness 'inwards' into layers of being. Going 'out' can be a useful, but largely metaphorical way of understanding this shift away from the physical body we are all so attached to.

Buhlman also said that in that workshop room, several -possibly hundreds- of spirits were listening in, to gain what knowledge they could to know what to do about the after death state. I did not even notice until someone who had photos of hundreds of orbs floating about like mushroom clouds at Ankor Wat, Cambodia, pointed out that there was one in my photo of the workshop room. I was astonished to see it there. The jury is still out on what causes orbs- dust specs and refracted light effects or wandering, nosy spirits?- but they certainly have a strange way of appearing sometimes, but not others, as if they are choosy.

People came forward with various odd experiences, and Buhlman took time to answer them all, so people went away satisfied- the workshop was a success, although with hard work ahead. If there is one motto, I'll take away from the weekend, it is 'Just Surrender' to the experience- it's all there waiting for you.

Kieron Devlin

It Wasn't

2010-06-12T14:49:00.006+01:00

I found an old poem the other day, ' It Wasn't' written in the eighties, so long buried, like looking down an old well at a reflection of myself I'm no longer familiar with. I had almost forgotten that poetry was my first and most important muse in those days. It was only later I started to write stories and essays. It is strange reading this again, like something that needs dusting off, before it fades away permanently. The person about whom it was written died in 2001 of AIDS related illnesses. I even remember designing this little Logo for the Oscars.

It wasn't

It wasn't the fact that you were wearing

soaked plimsolls in a muddy patch, and split

blades of grass were sticking to your turnups,

that made me grin; no, it just wasn't that.

My head had already turned with fever

at your smile; so Cheshire cat-like, giddy

with those allusions to my damp presence,

eliciting from the saturated,

rained-off past, the present tense response that

showers in summer are just what I need.

No, it wasn't that the waitress put two

sugars in my tea, when I distinctly

asked for coffee anyway, that made me

gulp it down. It was the count-to-ten,

instant adrenalin rush, seeing you

follow, when I paused, stalling, just to watch

you, detaching from your group of friends and

me, finding the grass so so interesting,

miles away from the old conversations

we had left behind, to say our hellos.

It wasn't even that our umbrellas

formed a rainbow canopy, a beam that

pierced through plum clouds and stopped me in my tracks,

which rendered clean the message: at all costs,

we must meet up, no matter when or where.

Some other lesson, barely remembered,

circle of events, careless matching, came

back in the crowd of men crushing in the

marquee, escaping the rain, drinking to

oblivion, with no trace of smile fever.

It was more a coincidence of past

doubt and present impulse that clinched it all,

counselling restraint; a hell of a bore

against well-aimed lips, targeting romance

at a loveless inner vacuum. We said,

"Hello", and the game was fast in motion.

What next? Not avoiding, not plunging on,

no safe solutions. Let's arrange a day,

and see what happens. Arousal began

already when you asked,

"What's your number?"

Kieron Devlin

From 'Take Any Train'.

Neuro Scientist works with Dalai Lama to study happiness

2010-05-22T15:20:00.005+01:00

I found this article and think, yeah, we know meditation expands all the higher faculties and still people are not convinced. If you learn how to do one thing in life, learn meditation and tap into that amazing inner silence that wraps and encompasses us all.

SCIENTIST INSPIRED BY DALAI LAMA STUDIES HAPPINESS

MADISON, Wis. — After hearing about his cutting-edge research on the brain and emotions through mutual friends, the Dalai Lama invited Richard Davidson to his home in India in 1992 to pose a question.

Scientists often study depression, anxiety and fear, but why not devote your work to the causes of positive human qualities like happiness and compassion? the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader asked.

"I couldn't give him a good answer," recalled Davidson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison neuro-scientist.

Since then, Davidson has become a partner in the Dalai Lama's attempts to build a connection between Buddhism and western science. This weekend, the Dalai Lama will mark the opening of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the university's Waisman Center, where more than a dozen researchers will study the science behind positive qualities of mind. Davidson said the center will be the only one in the world with a meditation room next to a brain imaging laboratory.

Davidson's research has used brain imaging technology on Buddhist monks and other veteran practitioners of meditation to try to learn how their training affects mental health.

His team's findings suggest meditation and other "contemplative practices" can improve compassion, empathy, kindness and attention. They support the concept that even adult brains can change through experience and learning.

"He's made some interesting discoveries about meditation, and I think he is doing very good science," said John Wiley, who was university chancellor from 2001 to 2008 and is interim director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Initially, "a significant number of his colleagues around the world were suspicious and thought that it wasn't adequately grounded in hard science," Wiley said. "He's proved them wrong."

The appearance comes as the Dalai Lama has spent more time promoting research into traditional Buddhist meditative practices and urging scientists to help create a more ethical and peaceful world.

Davidson, named one of Time magazine's most 100 influential people in 2006, will appear with the Dalai Lama at scientific events five times this year.

"His relationship with the Dalai Lama lends a great deal of public influence to the hard science that he does," said David Addiss, a former Centers for Disease Control official who now works at the Fetzer Institute, a Michigan nonprofit that gave Davidson a $2.5 million grant.

Yet Davidson's relationship with the Dalai Lama remains controversial. When he invited the Dalai Lama to speak at a 2005 neuroscience conference, dozens of researchers signed a petition in protest.

Some of the criticism appeared motivated by Chinese researchers who disagree politically with the Dalai Lama's stance on Tibet. Others said it was an inappropriate mix of faith with science.

Davidson, who meditates every morning but does not consider himself a practicing Buddhist, has also been criticized for being too close to someone with an interest in the outcome of his research.

Davidson said the Dalai Lama's commitment to science is remarkable for a religious leader of his stature, and notes that the Dalai Lama has said he is prepared to give up any part of Buddhism that is contradicted by scientific fact.

"He also is the first one to point out the limitations of meditation and how it's not a cure all and be all for everything and has very limited effects on health," Davidson said.

Davidson is ready to test his research in real-world situations. The center plans to begin training local fifth-grade teachers next fall to cultivate skills like patience and relaxation among their students.

"We're really intrigued with his research that shows students can learn how to relax so they can focus more on learning," said Sue Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary schools in the Madison public schools.

Ac Cent Tuate The Pos it ive

2010-04-19T19:38:00.006+01:00

I've been hearing a lot of negative stuff from people lately who don't realize they're so full of bile yet I have to hear them out, so it was serendipitous to come across this Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer. song, sung here by Aretha Franklin, with phrasing lifted from Dinah Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IP9h40z0sk

here are the words

You've got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy up to the maximum

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium's Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate his last remark Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark

What did they do Just when everything looked so dark.

Man, they said we better Accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

No, do not mess with Mister In-Between

You've gotta accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy

Bring gloom (down) down to the minimum Otherwise (otherwise) pandemonium Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark

What did they say

Say when everything looked so dark

Man, they said we better Accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

No! Baby Don't mess with Mister In-Between

Healing through Writing Workshop, The Feelgood Centre

2010-03-23T20:15:00.003Z

Wednesday, March 31st, 6.30pm

Ever feel you have something unsaid still locked inside?

Then this workshop might be for you. Learn How Writing really can heal your life. Journaling is often overlooked in our busy lives. With a sensitive approach, truthful writing can be used a therapeutic tool to uncover long buried feelings to gain insight, and thus regain power. Writing your way to health is simple, easy and even good fun.

Kieron’s approach to writing is a unique synthesis of ideas about how writing releases emotions, thus clearing the way for self growth; it is based on a variety of methods developed by pioneers in the field. The added bonus is that he also uses techniques from energy psychology.

During the session you will be shown how to:

• write freely without self censorship
• become centred and focussed
• release blocked emotions
• clarify long standing or unresolved issues
• be more in contact with your dreams

Who is it for?

The workshop is most valuable for people who have recently been through a difficult transition, a major illness, relationship break down, or other traumatic experiences. However because writing can also be a fun activity, it is really open to anyone who feels they have a story they have not yet voiced, or are you just somebody with a story to tell, then writing could be the answer for you.

The Feelgood Centre, 33-34 Chiswell Street, EC1 SFY Barbican or Moorgate Tube
Call 07896 483746

Writing as Self Hypnosis Healing

2010-02-20T16:11:00.002Z

Writing is a much undervalued tool for accessing calmer, wiser inner states of mind. When we write, we activate thought streams from both left and right hemispheres of our brain and connect them to our hand. This allows a greater flow of insight and creativity. Problems can seem like monster hurdles, but when they are written out on the page in full, they can trigger perceptual shifts. Seen from this new perspective, they are suddenly unthreatening, bearable or even self-created.

Writing has great health benefits as James Pennebaker’s experiments have proven. There is a direct link between writing about traumas and a healthy rebalancing of the immune system, which aids healing. This won’t happen however, if we just write a few quick notes on a scrap of paper. Having a serious approach, and mustering the courage to tackle our ‘troubling life experiences’ is what will make it work. These personal life events that may contain abuse, rage, violence, depression, doubt, confusion, and low self esteem - are the ‘knots’ of our lives that need unravelling. They are often events we could not understand at the time they happened, but which nevertheless form the basis of our habitual character. They are major stressors that have an impact on our health.

Promoting the body’s natural mechanisms of defence is something that doesn’t have to cost a lot of money paid to a psychotherapist or doctor. It is something we can do for ourselves. It can even take us much further than this, as once a first trauma is cleared, another deeper issue may arise. This is the signal from our higher selves that we are being challenged to grow.

If you write a journal regularly, or keep a daily diary of your thoughts, you will already have experienced the positive health benefits : fewer visits to the doctor, more ‘inner space’, deeper insight into yourself and others, an appreciation of cycles and overall life patterns, ability to make more informed and sustainable choices. Journaling develops an intimacy with the self that far from making us isolated, helps us to understand more easily what others are going through as well. It can even encourage life-long self development.

What is fascinating to me is that writing is a natural trance. Everyone is born knowing how to do, yet many fail to realise its health potential. Some may believe that only a hypnotherapist can create a trance deep enough for healing to occur, but all of us are doing it all the time whenever we go inside ourselves. When writers write stories they are in a creative trance. When readers read these stories, they are also in co-creative trance, engaging with what the writer has produced.

Trance states, where our attention is directed inwards, are both calming and energising. It is through understanding this and acting on it that allows us to realise our physiology and helps us work towards greater psycho-energetic healing.

Writing in a trance state may therefore be the most potent yet accessible way of doing self hypnosis healing that we have available. Done properly, it is a very valuable healing tool that is open to anyone with pen, paper and the ‘write’ approach.

Kieron is a hypnotherapist working in Central London. He runs Writing As Healing workshops at The Feelgood Centre, 33-34,Chiswell Street, EC1.

www.kierondevlin.com

Kalipara Rock Puja, Neyyar Dam, Kerala, India

2010-01-04T12:03:00.023Z

Last night, the Saturday 26th, we were taken on a special trip. 'We' in this case are the ashramites staying at the Sivananda Ashram, Neyyar Dam, Kerala, which is a natural beauty spot and a haven away from anything urban. It lies on the edge of a dam surrounded by mountain peaks and a national wildlife sanctuary. They said it was 'just a walk up a hill' for a Puja. It turned out to be more like a hard core hike, that proved unforgettable. We gathered at the ashram gate did a four-step meditation walk, chanting 'Om' internally each four steps. We'd been specially invited to witness this Kali Puja and respect was due to the goddess and the holy rock. The youngish Canadian Swami lead around 100 people in a silent walk down leafy country lanes, at sun down so the trees and bushes were full of mosquitoes, the sound of cicadas and whooping birds, the smell of wood fires, frangipani scent wafted across from open wooden houses where locals lived. An enormous variety of trees grew everywhere, including banana, coconut palms and rubber trees - long grasses by the edge of the pathways reached out as though to touch us. As we passed through the Dam area, locals were curious and said 'hello'. No one replied as we had vowed silence. Why were all these foreigners walking silently to Kalipara Rock? No answer- so the mystery deepened.

We were warned to bring torches as it soon got dark and the path was rocky and perilous. We had to take our shoes off on the upper rock because it was sacred, but no one expected the steepness of the climb with some treacherous rock face to clamber up. Parts of it were so sheer it could freak out the unwary. To look down was fatal. Intention alone impelled us upwards against the odds. No one fell or broke an ankle. We scaled the rock face without incident, although it involved some serious barefoot grip, not to mention rock climbing skills. All were sweating as they reached the top to regain breath.Going barefoot was nasty as the tiny rocks ripped into the soles of my feet and seemed to lodge there. Each step was tentative and painful, only easing off on the smoother rock surfaces.

On the top of the rock itself the puja had already begun. A ceremonial fire was kept alive in a small reed hut fed continuously by the Kali devotee. Everyone watched eager to know what was happening- he just fed the fire with offerings. Fellow ashramite, La La, didn’t come because he had been before, perhaps he knew how difficult the climb would be? Frederick said he suffers a little from vertigo and he found he was only able to get to the top because it was so dark, he just could not see how dangerous it was.

The Kali Puja devotees wore only clean white dhotis wrapped around their loins. A group of women huddled together watched eagerly. The men burned food offerings in a small woven hut where a candle in front of the sacred fire. Drummers beat out a primal rhythm interspersed monotonous bell ringing. The place wafted with incense and wood smoke. It inspired reverence and high expectancy. Then at the peak moment, the principle devotee removed the fire from the fire, and three others blew into conch shells, a bellowing primal sounds echoing across the dark hills, sounding just as it did centuries ago. It was energetically potent. The rock itself has a legend about a famous guru who favoured it as the counter balance the Himalayas of north India. The little bowl where a pool of water formed is said to be where this guru meditated and his lotus pose left an impression.

The top of the rock was small to cope with so many people at once. Luckily, it was too dark to see how sheer the cliff face was on one side. Also it was lucky no one broke their ankle or got lost in the dense undergrowth surrounding the rock. The human chain of people could be spotted by pinpoints of light between trees. Torches helping others see their way and avoid falling dark made it a communal experience. We were not alone under that night sky was rich with stars and so it was like plugging back into the socket of nature's energy. People who live cocooned in cities can really appreciate. Just to be there on Kalipara Hill was a privilege, and to be invited personally from the ashram an honour. The view of the surrounding hill tops and valleys apparently is magnificent and some camp out there so they can witness dawn where the light changes would reveal this wonderful location in its glory.

It was a personal thrill to be part of the Kali Puja, and more than repaid the effort of the dangerous climb. I noted how the music can hypnotise people quickly, the sound of repetitive drumming, smoke and bell ringing, all part of the 'dream time'. We all bathed in the sacred smoke, and anointed our foreheads with flower pods and felt special.

Kali is a serious goddess, not for the faint of heart. She is goddess of cyclical time and destruction and grants release from the binding emotions of anger, greed and lust. She is often depicted with a garland of skulls around her neck, dead hands around her waist, the sword of knowledge in hand, chopping of heads (the ego) her foot on the chest of Shiva, sticking out her tongue at the god's unusual behaviour. She is known to love sucking the blood of demons, and can get carried away doing this. Shiva, her husband, threw himself under her feet in order to stop her raging madness against evil. The effect is like the calm after the storm. Doing Kali Puja aids one in fighting off enemies and freeing one from the chains of karma. It is a religious cleansing act done on this day to celebrate the power of Kalipara which means 'rock of Kali'. Thus, she 'rocks'.

The ‘cultish’ aspect of being with a group from an ashram didn’t escape me, but I was open to the experience of reconnecting to nature and an ancient rite as practised by Hindus for thousands of years. It was a high point - literal and metaphoric- of my trip to Kerala, a peak experience that is etched in my psyche.

Good Walking Mad Morning Free E Booklet

2009-11-27T21:25:00.004Z

So it's finally arrived - Free E-Day. Here's my little offering, Good Walking, Mad Morning, a meandering verbal meditation on the joys of walking coupled with reflections on the fast-changing scenery of inner London.

In the City people are the landscape.

Complete with my own photos.

it's available by clicking this link to the Scribd Site.

Happy reading.

Top Ten Songs that had an Impact on my Life

2009-11-10T20:41:00.009Z

Recently I was asked to do a Desert Island Discs choice, to select the top ten songs that moved me, songs that had an impact on my life. I've often thought how true the line by Noel Coward is 'extraordinary how potent cheap music is.' Its power is so underestimated. The paradox is that cheap doesn't do it justice; it is more like vast inner riches with all the associations the songs bring up. The limit was ten - Ten!!!! It was criminal. So many gems to be discarded from the parade.

Wracking my brains was easy but selecting was extremely hard. I ended up with a continually reshuffled list of nearly 30 songs vital to significant moments in my life. It bugged me for days, yet I kept remembering more and more songs that had a powerful impact on me. So it's wonderful for jogging the memory. Who could ever forget The Verve's haunting anthem Bitter Sweet Symphony back in 1997? I can't, no doubt along with thousands of others whose lives it touched. Yet, I could not include it. I tended to wallow back in the Seventies when I was in my teens. I cut my teeth on the early part of the decade when life without music was unthinkable.

So here's my list... It may not suit most people, taste is subjective after all. They are roughly in chronological order, rather than in order of merit.I vote for them all equally but don't be surprised if I retain the right to change my mind.

• Dolphins: Tim Buckley

• Quicksand: David Bowie

• Boredom: The Buzzcocks

• Light of the Magical Moon: Marc Bolan

• Perfect Day: Lou Reed

• Corpus Christi Carol: Jeff Buckley

• To The Birds: Suede

• Let Down: Radiohead

• The Guests: (Leonard Cohen) Anthony and the Johnsons

• Adam’s Lullaby: Natacha Atlas/Jocelyn Pook

Enjoy listening.I recommend doing it as an exercise in what is important to you. Send your lists so I can listen too. Choose songs that are great landmarks that mark stages in your life. We probably churned through lots of difficult experiences and were helped by these songs in countless subtle yet profound ways that have now been coded into our DNA and will go with us to the grave. It definitely gets you reflecting hard on which ones not just affected you but really seared deep. Music has a transforming power, which allows us to overcome the love of power and enter a shared world of emotions.

As Aldous Huxley said: After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Is Hypnosis an Altered State?

2009-10-25T18:12:00.002Z

Latest News on the nature of Hypnosis: Is it an Altered State?

If you are one of the few still wondering if hypnosis is safe and effective, here is a fascinating article. It helps dispel the media-generated myths that have grown around hypnotic trance. It says clearly that hypnosis could be a hitherto unrecognised different state of consciousness, or just a variation on normal waking consciousness. Whichever it is, one thing is sure: our beliefs and expectations colour the outcome yet it is still a state of mind accessible to everyone to be utilized for change. It is elusive to precise scientific definition. Yet, in this state, we can hold two opposing ideas in our minds at the same time; we can enjoy the benefits of a deep slow-cycle brain waves called ‘THETA’ , and far from being a zombie, you are fully aware of the powerful change it can bring about. Let’s hope the research continues…Read the full article at: Hypnos.co.uk

Free E-Download Day Brochure

2009-10-10T19:10:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Dan Holloway from songs from the other side of the wall for providing this. The Free E Day is the online festival of independent music, literature, and art. The first free e-brochure for the event is now available. You can download it for free at the Free E-Download Day website.

This day is a celebration of all that's free on the internet.

You will also find a link to the Bookbuzzr for the event - the Bookbuzzr is an incredible widget that not only allows you to read the brochure on line in a super-whizzy format, but also enables you to embed it in your social media pages. Any of you who want to share the brochure in this way, that would be fantastic! You can use the Bookbuzzr widget for better ways to read it. Click "read now" to read in full screen and note that there is a zoom feature if you're having problems with the smaller print.

It includes my Writing as Healing Workshop info. That's on November 25th. Naturally as I'm taking part in this festival, there will be a free download from me of a story called 'Good Walking Mad Morning'. So look out for that.

Writing As Healing Workshop

2009-09-29T18:45:00.004+01:00

Writing as Healing Workshop

Wednesday November 25^th , 6.30-8.30pm,The Feelgood Centre

Ever feel you have something unsaid still locked inside? Then this workshop might be for you. Learn How Writing really can heal your life. Journaling is often overlooked in our busy lives. With a sensitive approach, truthful writing can be used a therapeutic tool to uncover long buried feelings to gain insight, and thus regain power. Writing your way to health is simple, easy and even good fun.

This workshop invites you to explore the true value of how writing unravels problems, first by getting them on to the page. Deeper feelings can come through images and metaphors which should be valued as messages from the unconscious. Writing out your problems on a piece of paper can clear many long-standing issues.

Kieron’s approach to writing is a unique synthesis of ideas about how writing releases emotions, thus clearing the way for self growth. It is based on a variety of methods developed by pioneers in the field such as Julia Cameron, James Pennebaker, Kathleen Adams, and Tristine Rainer. The added bonus is that he also uses techniques from developments in EFT, neuroscience, guided visualisation, lucid dreaming, energy psychology and personal development as aids to discovery.

During the session you will be shown how to:

· become centred and focussed

· visualise through imagery

· write freely without censoring yourself

· release blocked emotions

· clarify long standing or unresolved issues

· be more in contact with your dreams

It is not a standard Creative Writing class but could lead to more confidence to write stories and poetry. Confidentiality and personal boundaries are respected. The workshop is most useful for people who have recently been through a difficult transition, a major illness, relationship break down, or other traumatic experiences. But, since writing can also be a fun activity, it is really open to anyone who feels they have a story they have not yet voiced where writing as the best medium to reveal it.

Kieron is a practising writer of fiction and non fiction. He has taught Creative Writing and has done extensive research into the healing power of writing. He is also a qualified Hypnotherapist and Lightning Process Practitioner.

www.kierondevlin.com info@kierondevlin.com

Tel: 07896 483746

The Feelgood Centre, 34-5, Chiswell Street, London, EC1.