Religious Resonance: A Psychotherapeutic Resource

This is an article that was just published in the Santa Barbara Chapter of CAMFT.

In the early days of my role as a Presbyterian minister I did a lot of Pastoral Counseling. The more I did this the more I wanted to know and understand about psychology. I read widely but quickly realized that there were two main points of view: first, the traditional, theologically based view that attempted to explain all experiences and treatments in terms of accepted and approved biblical and theological dogma; second, was the variety of psychological schools that tended to reduce religious perspectives to fantasy and wish-fulfillment.

It was when I was introduced to C.G. Jung’s work that I finally found a point of view that respected the “religious” experience as a psychological reality that was rooted in each person’s experience. A few years later as I was training to be a certified Jungian analyst I came across the following quote: In Jung’s Collected Works vol. 11 he defines religion as “a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word ‘religio’, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors, that are conceived as ‘powers’: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideals, or whatever name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved.”

Over the years I have found that this “peculiar attitude” has allowed me to work with a very broad spectrum of clients from a variety of backgrounds in terms of their experience with religion. For many this has included experiences within traditional religious institutions that left them angry and abandoned. For others it is a question of how to respect their own belief in rationalism, atheism, science etc. and still have a way to relate to what they experience as something larger and unknown. For Joseph Campbell a major stumbling block regarding the value of a “religious” point of view can be found in our attitudes toward metaphor and symbol. In Thou art that he observes, “half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
In my experience the main function of metaphor and symbol is to give us a way to address the “Other”, be it internal or external. In Jungian terms this Other starts with the Shadow, those elements of the whole personality that are not acceptable to our adaptation to the world. These elements can include things like anger, power, greed and sexual fantasies. But they can also be positive things we don’t know how to claim – like talents, creativity, and anything that might evoke envy from others. On a larger scale we collectively project these Shadow elements onto the world by creating Others in terms of race, gender, language, culture, religion and politics. From this perspective the Shadow, using Jung’s definition, can be seen as a religious issue or dynamic. The key has to do with how the projections, be they positive or negative, activate psychic energy. All therapists have experienced such positive and negative energy in terms of transference and counter-transference dynamics.

How does having an attitude that is open to what I am calling Religious Resonance help us at these times? First, it gives us a way to respect what is happening as not all being generated at an ego level. The advantage of this is that we can be open to addressing and resolving them within our human limits. Resolution does not have to be perfect. Second, such respect for the idea that more is present than just the ego actually frees us to avoid the extremes of either identifying with the power aspect of such psychic energy on the one hand, or, being crushed by the dark side of it on the other. It is at this point we can take on the demanding task of taking responsibility for what is ours rather than what we have projected onto others. Not surprisingly we as therapists and as persons often encounter enormous resistance to the idea that we have any responsibility for what is happening. It is important at this juncture to note that taking responsibility is not the same as taking blame. Such self-blame allows me to avoid the always difficult aspect of holding what Jung called the “tension of the opposites” where more than one thing is true. Taking responsibility for this “tension of the opposites” is what creates a religious resonance because it is just there that the “peculiar attitude” opens us to a third thing in terms of a dream or a symbol that somehow resolves the situation in an inclusive rather than an exclusive way. Here is the living experience that is at the core of all the great religions of the world. Here one is confronted with the mystery that threatens to overwhelm us, and the grace that transcends our old point of view. It is also here that we do everything we can to not have our familiar ego perspective relativised in relationship to a larger Other. We tend to cling to whatever dogma has worked in the past be in theological, political or psychological. Jung has said that one of the functions of religion is to protect us from the religious experience. Which is to say the immediacy of Other.

I believe with Alice Miller that most of us are called to this work out of our own life experiences and hopefully in that process we have found healing as well as vocation. Such healing often, if not always, included opening to the most vulnerable parts of ourselves and trusting an “other” to see us and hear us so that we might see, hear and experience a self that included more than just our ego’s perspective.
. In our offices powerful energies are present whether we like them or not. We may experience them as seductive and exhilarating at some points, and mysterious, overwhelming and humbling at others. It is our ability to continually have the courage to recognize and respect our experiences with “Other” and bring to them this “peculiar attitude” that fosters a truly religious resonance and helps keep our work alive.

First the Darkness, then the Light

I’ve always liked those comic strips where when someone gets an idea a little light bulb comes on over their head.  What I think we tend to forget is the “pre-light bulb” state, the darkness before the light.  We have just passed through the Winter Solstice and those shorter darker days are now moving toward the light.  My friend John Copeland reminds me that “solstice” means “stand-still sun”.  In about six months the cycle will complete and start all over again.   This amazing process of moving toward and away from darkness and light are metaphors for our own relationship with the light and the dark.

I work on the assumption that we have a preference, even a prejudice, for the light that is matched by our more negative associations to darkness.  So, I am here to speak up for darkness.  I think that darkness gets a bad rap and needs to be looked at in a “new light”.  (I think that’s irony, but not sure. )   My premise for this situation is that it is mostly the ego that doesn’t like the darkness because it is too much of a reminder about how limited it really is in the face of the larger unknown, the tremendum, the transcendent.  And that unknown gets identified with darkness.  The darkness is the place of mysteries: the earth that holds the seeds; the womb that holds new life; the forest that holds monsters.   It is the realm of the unknown and the Other.  One response to this is to be in denial.  This simply leads us further into the darkness.  (More irony?)  Another is to project our own darkness onto others.  Again, this simply creates another larger problem since we end up dealing with “in here” issues “out there”.

C.G. Jung speaks of this as the Shadow we all carry.  Dealing with these unclaimed darknesses in ourselves isn’t easy.   So we hang onto our denial fiercely.  Woe be to the one who points out my darkness to me.  As for the Other, we are drawn to various methods of control or destruction that simply don’t work because they are dealing with the wrong problem in the wrong place. What to do?  Well, the simplest thing is to continue to do what we have always done and hope for a different outcome.  We can hope someone will come along and solve the problem, i.e., make the darkness go away.  We can make a lot of noise and glitter and maybe scare it away, or at least be momentarily distracted.  By theway, glitter is not light, it is just a distraction.  Or, we can learn from the Solstice cyle that these two are part of a whole, a whole that is never static.  The continual movement of light in dark that we experience through this cycle is at least measurable and predictable.  The daily dance of light and dark in our lives is not so predictable.  The rhythms of this life dance can go from high to low, fast to slow, pleasant to overwhelming in the blink of an eye, or unfold over the years of an illness.

Jack Kornfield says, “The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are.”  Sometimes they are very dark.  We don’t have to like it.  And yet, this darkness is a call to wholeness.  Real light needs real darkness to complete it.

Reaching In and Reaching Out

I’m quite fascinated with my love hate relationship with writing here.  As a result I started paying attention to various ways that we communicate.  These include: letters; words – written and oral and electronic; photos and videos; rants and love songs; speeches and cries for help.  Then I was reminded of two of my old favorites: T-shirts and Bumper Stickers.  My all time favorite T-shirt says on the front: “Don’t They Know Who I am?”; and, on the back, “Who Do They Think They Are?”  And for Bumper Stickers, the winners are – they both have to be on the same bumper – “Life’s a Bitch, Then You Die” and “Have a Nice Day.”   More and more we have methods available to express whatever it is we wish to express.  The electronic/Internet universe has added whole new categories: email; text messaging; tweets; Facebook and other social networking sites; videos – on Youtube and many other sources, and, of course, Blogging.  So, I’m back to my question to myself: What is it I want to share and how much time and energy do I want to put into it, and to what end?  On any given day I, and I think you readers as well,  are motivated by a variety of impulses to reach out or not.  There are those who Blog with discipline, consistency and focus – much like those who write regular columns in newspapers – you remember newspapers.  Then I thought about whether or not the method one chooses to communicate says anything about the what and the why we are trying to express.  The appeal of a tweet with it’s 140 character limit allows for great immediacy, a kind of itching of a scratch to relieve some need.  Facebook requires a little more time and effort and activates a larger context with photos and wall writings and other options.  This suggests to me that here the desire may be to give a bit more of ourselves.  As for Blogging I find it taps into my need to both express something and open up a dialogue on some particular theme.  That said, I am very poor at following up on the comments that many of you have made.  So maybe all I really want to do is preach/act/teach a bit and wait for the applause.  This says something about a lot of what I think motivates these notes in an electronic bottle that we toss out into the Cyber-Sea.  “I’m here.”  So, maybe it’s not so much applause we want  but a reminder that we’re not quite as alone as we often feel.  When I take the time to give attention to all the messages I get, in whatever format, I notice that they are all a way of the other giving me a piece of themselves.  Consider this a little piece of myself.  Thanks for listening.

Have to and Get to

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of feeling like I don’t have enough “get to” in my life – which I blame on too much “have to”. I’ve been thinking about how often I hear myself and others using the phrase, “I have to”, to describe pretty much every part of their daily lives.  “I have to go to work.”  “I have to go shopping.”  “I have to reply to my e-mails, facebooks, tweets, etc.”  Do you know anyone, including you, who doesn’t talk about how overwhelmed they are.  There is always a pile, a list, a chore.   That pitch is driven by the idea that once we get the lists and chores taken care of then…..  We can relax, have fun, read a book, walk on the beach, start writing the book, painting the picture, spend time with those friends.  Need I go on?  The problem is that the “Have to” list never gets done.  It has dawned on me that this whole issue of “have to” is based on a lie.  I believe that the only thing we HAVE to do in this life is die.  Everything else is negotiable.  Yes, yes, I can hear you say, “But if I don’t go to work, I don’t get paid, I’ll have no food or place to live.”  I didn’t say there aren’t consequences to what we do or don’t do.  All I’m saying is that we don’t have to do them.  There really are choices.  Often they are very limited choices, but there are choices.  One choice I can make is about what attitude I take toward these choices.  I have come to really like coming at all this based on the point of view that I “get to” do, or not do, X, Y, or Z.  No, I haven’t decided to test this all out by quitting working.  I have started on a simpler level, and it seems to be having an impact.  I have added words like “need to” and “want to” to my repertoire.  The first thing I began to notice is that I felt less helpless.  Again, I’m not saying that I feel all empowered and “get to” do or not do whatever I want.  I still drive on the freeway by going the same direction that the other cars are going,  but I drive a little slower because I don’t feel quite so “have to” oriented.  I am amazed at what happens when I change “I have to go to work” to “I get to go to work.”  I know that in this economy I am lucky to have a job.  And I am even luckier to have a job I enjoy most of the time.  I get to have a dog, two cats and two horses.  I don’t have to have them I get to have them.  I am blessed.  And, in exchange, I need to feed them and clean up after them.  Not always convenient or a lot of fun, but it is part of the package.  I can choose to not “have” to be inconvenienced, but at what cost.  It’s a package deal as far as I can tell.  So, where is this all going on the afternoon of this Labor Day? I’m not sure, but I also don’t have to have it go anywhere.  I think I’ll simply let it be what it is for now because I get to make that choice.

A Taste of/for Life

OK, so I haven’t written here in a long while.  Nobody told me that it was going to be hard to come up with stuff on a regular basis.  And then my sabbatical was over and I was working so much and and and …………  Stop me if you’ve heard this sad story before.  Bottom line: I’m back.

Partly I am writing again because I got a taste for doing this and I liked it.  Also, I’ve been very grateful for the many responses and the support.  So I think I’ll make my re-entry around this whole idea of getting a taste of something.  Taste in this sense is literal, as when we put things in our mouths and have the taste buds and saliva and sensory stuff in there give us an experience.  It is used in various other ways as well: she had great taste in clothes and bad taste in men.  We talk about a taste “of” and a taste “for” something.  We talk about someone being “tasteless” altogether.  In Mob movies they talk about having “a little taste” of the action.  In the literal sense a taste is like a sample of something so that we can know whether we like it or not.  It is the data that tells us whether we want more or not.

It makes me think of Adam and Eve who took a taste of the forbidden fruit.  The standard line about them is that this was a bad thing, that they blew Eden and put us on the road of suffering and limitation and death.  But, I mean, if you could go back there and stop them from taking that first taste would you do it?

I guess what I am getting at is that we are all still faced with the same question:  Do we want to take the risk of living a life that includes the knowledge of good and evil; the life of consciousness and consequenc; or, do we want to stay in our best version of Eden – the comfort zone of the safe and the known and the pre-approved?

Let me put it another way.  I spent most of my life hating tomatos.  I mean really hating them.  How many fundamentalist anti-tomato people do you know.  I am their poster-child.  Then one day my wife basically said, “Try this or else.”  Since I was pretty sure what the “or else” might entail I gave it a try.  I didn’t die.  In fact I have now become a tomato snob who turns up his nose at store-bought tomatos and would much prefer to have the ones we grow in the yard.

The point is that I was totally convinced I would die, and I didn’t.

Yes, I know there are all kinds of things one can try a taste of that are really deadly.  But cut me a little slack here I am just trying to make a point.  When we get so convinced that “tasting” certain things that are outside the known zone, the familiar, the seemingly safe it starts to become a habit.  Pretty soon we become so good at being safe that we forget how to live.  I am not talking particularly about things like sky-diving or bungee jumping per se, but that’s up to you.  I am talking about the immediacy of life that comes when we risk “tasting” something: a new food, new music, new ideas, new people; maybe, just starting to “taste” our feelings and thoughts.  Yes, there are risks involved.  Don’t get me started on eggplant.  But mostly we don’t die.  In fact we may start to expand our appetites.

Just Nosing Around

I can hardly wait to see what this turns out to be.  “Smelling the Music”?  I had to walk away from this one for a couple of days, but then the phrase, “There’s music in the air” came to me.  I read somewhere that our capacity to perceive and differentiate smells was critical in our evolution.  These days we’re still using it, but not giving it enough credit.  According to Wikipedia there are all kinds of pheromones from food, to trails, to sex that affect our behavior whether we know it or not, or like it or not.  I think that one of the reasons that smell doesn’t get enough respect is that it isn’t about anything tangible.  Whereas sight, sound, taste and touch seem more real, more demonstatable somehow.  Smell is so subjective.  If you don’t believe me just talk to any wine lover who can wax rhapsodic about grassy and buttery and leathery and ….  And they will go to war over this stuff.  I think it is because, potential snobbery aside, celebrating a very personal experience. Certainly a lot of animals have what I’m told is an amazing sense of smell.  Dean Koontz has written stories that rely on the point of view of a dog and his smelling ability.  So, what about us?  Is this just something we’ve let wither away for lack of respect and attention?  And, how does this apply to the music of life?  I know I could rant on this using metaphors of/for smell,  but it is not metaphors we need here it is the living experience.  So, what is the living experience of smelling music?  First thought: a baby’s diaper.  If that isn’t part of the music of life then I don’t know what is.  Fresh baked cookies.   A lot of my happiest music smells are associated with food.  But, then there’s fresh cut grass.  The smoke from fireplaces and camping.  At some level isn’t it interesting how much money gets spent covering up smells?  “You stink?”  That’s not something any of us wants to hear, but “What’s that cologne you have on?”, that’s ok.  It wasn’t that long ago that cultures around the world would offer up burnt offerings hoping to appease and influence the gods and goddesses with the smell.  As close as we come these days is the BBQ in the backyard where we make our offerings to the good life by pretending to be primitive.  As I read this over I begin to “smell a rat”.  I’m missing something.  Maybe a piece of it has to do with the way smells can so easily transcend boundaries.  They, like the Holy Spirit and my old friend the Trickster, are no respecter of artificially drawn lines.  Good smells and bad smells find a way in.  No wonder we try to cover them up.

Do you hear what I here? (not a typo!)

My friend JD got on my case today about not having posted anything lately. So, thanks JD and here goes. I want to talk about hearing the music. This is probably the hardest aspect to talk about since hearing the music seems to be the most obvious way we take it in. “Of course I hear the music.” “How can I not hear it. It’s right there.” I don’t know about you but I lose touch with the music with some frequency and have to re-member how to hear again.    Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here I am not talking about simply those forms of music which are official, written down and performed by players and singers.  I am talking about the music that is the soundtrack of life.  The music that is always present when we pay attention.  The music that ranges from birds to traffic to symphonies to stomachs gurgling to the endless chatter in my head.  For me the music is always right here and right now.  Which means we have to be here to hear. Have you ever noticed how much of the time our first reaction  to traditional music is to play “Name that Tune”?  As a result we lose both hearing and “hereing” in the process. It’s a form of self-lobotomy wherein our right brain get excised from the immediate experience while our left brain gets all full of itself and doesn’t notice that the music has been lost in the process and now we’re hearing a lecture on the music instead. If we’re lucky we have had some experiences of the right hemisphere declaring independence.  I first really was aware of this through the hymns and spritiuals of my years in the church.   And let’s not forget Elvis and Motown  and Rock and Roll.  There was no way to hear  such music and not have our bodies back in the experience. But it was when I extended my right brain’s openness to all sounds as music that things really got interesting.  It dawned on me that we hear before we see as we float around the womb.   Whenever I really am paying attention in a kind of hereing hearing I am struck by how one dimensional we experience life.  Sadly I think that all that mental traffic is the primary experience of hearing that most of us have.  I am more and more convinced that that monkey mind chatter is the left brain trying to take over again.  To again put itself and its words in the center of things.  I don’t think it is accidental that the ego seems to start setting up shop as soon as it has words. A very interesting descriptions of this experience is Jill Bolt Taylor’s book “My stroke of Insight” where she describes her stroke. (You can hear her talk about it on Amazon.  Just type in “My Stroke of Insight” and watch the video of her telling her story.  I believe that most of our immediate experiences are centered in the right hemisphere of our brains.  But what about all those words and thoughts in my left brain?  They feel pretty immediate to me.  My working hypothsis is that all those thoughts and ideas and chatter only have meaning when they are in service to something other that themselves.  There is music on both sides of the brain waiting to be heard.

Touching and being touched by the music

It looks like I am going to work through all five senses. OK, we’ve done hearing and seeing so let’s do touching next. When I speak of being touched by the music that is all around us I am not thinking of it in terms of emotion, but rather more literally. I find it when I pay attention to petting my dog. I have felt it at Rock concerts where the sounds literally vibrated my whole being. As a child with eczema I can remember “playing” with the itches that arose with a full range from exquisite teaseing to furious and bloody attacks on my skin. Remember the first time you ever rode in an open convertible, or stuck your head out of the back window in the family car and felt the wind make its music on your face? There was also the music that touches us in ways we don’t like. Anyone who has ever experienced an earthquake knows how terrifying that can be. Can’t leave out physical pains from banging our shins against a table to falling off a bicycle to broken limbs and dental procedures. I’m assuming by now that some of you are wondering where the music is in a dentist’s drill. All I can say is that that painful aspects are there, but so is the music and if I try to exclude it because I don’t enjoy this particular song my life is smaller as a result. In the book, “A Path with Heart” Jack Kornfield says, “The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are.” The way things are, from my point of view, is all about the music.  The hard part is paying attention on its terms rather than limiting ourselves.  We can have music or Musak.

Seeing the Music

In an oft-quoted letter written by Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille she speaks of  “a vitality, a life source” that is unique to each of us.  Later in the letter she urges de Mille to “keep the channel open”.  That letter echoes in me everytime I think about life as a dance.  But how does one “keep the channel open”?  I think we have to learn how to hear the music, which, if Orr is correct, is everywhere.  So, I started thinking about different ways to be aware of the music.  The most obvious is to hear it.  But now, we’re talking about a much broader understanding of what the music is.  I’m more and more convinced that all sounds are available to be experienced from this perpsective.  It doesn’t take that much practice to get the knack of hearing all sounds as a kind of music.  What if we expand our channel to include the other senses?  For esample, how do we see the music that is everywhere?  Once the idea presents itself it’s really pretty easy.  Everywhere we turn our eyes – inner and outer – there is music to be seen.  As usual there are sights that we like better and worse because of our limited visual point of view.  But when we relax a bit and can stop naming everything we see and simply see it, then the music starts.  Or, more to the point, we start to make ourselves available to the music.  I can’t imagine listening to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” without seeing New York; or, to “An American in Paris” without seeing Paris.  Movie soundtracks have been crossing this threshold for decades and we often hardly notice that our “seeing” and our “hearing” have begun a dance of their own.  And gathered us up in the process.  My wife and I kid about how she hates musicals because no one breaks into song in the middle of daily life.  Basically true, but what a shame.  Of course there is singing in the shower and in the car as long as we think no one is looking.  Taking that a step or two further what if we don’t wait for “official” music to show up?  What if we find, hear, see music everywhere we look?  Try it, you might be — I was about to write, pleasantly surprised, but what came out was, presently surprised.  I think both things are true.  Stop, look and listen.

Dancing at the Threshold

I have just changed the name of my blog to Dancing at the Threshold.  I think I am slowly getting a sense of what it is I am trying to do here. There’s a poem by Gregory Orr that I use with emails that goes like this:

To be alive: not just the carcass

But the spark.

That’s crudely put, but…

If we’re not supposed to dance,

Why  all this music?

For a long time the idea of the threshold has intrigued me.  My first meaningful encounter with it came from my interest in Trickster mythology.  One of the main characteristics of the Trickster in all the mythologies about him/her around the world is the idea that he is always on the move.  This resonated when I got a beginning understanding of some of the new physics which emphasizes the idea that everything is motion all the time.  Piet Hut of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies puts it this way:  “There are no things. That’s right.  No thing exists, there are only actions.  We live in a world of verbs, and nouns are only shorthand for those verbs whose actions are sufficiently stationary to show some thing-like behavior.” Putting these two together it seems to me that the best verb of all may be “dance”.  But where is all this music that Orr refers to?  And then it dawned on me; the music is everywhere.  The variety of the music is as broad as all human experience.  Some music we like and some we don’t.  As I write this I can hear music coming from my front room.  And I can also hear the music of the traffic on the nearby highway.  I can hear the music of my wife clicking away on her computer as she answers email.  Then there is the music of the blank page that I referred to in my last post.  And then I realized that what we experience as blank or empty is the context for all the different kinds of music that exist.  And that’s when the threshold idea came back to me.  We are always dancing on the threshold between the infiniteness of possibilities and the “thing-like” world that we orient ourselves around.  When we, as the Buddhists might say, grasp the thing-like stuff the dance stops.  One last quote from an old Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movie: “Pick yourself up.  Dust yourself off. And, start all over again.”  May I have this dance?