Part 2 & 3

“Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing?

Dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.”

-       D. H. Lawrence (Phoenix, 1972)

“It is no accident that the history of art is filled with grotesque images – bloody and twisted crucifications, graceful distorted bodies, and surrealistic landscapes. Sometimes deviation from the usual is a special revelation of truth. In alchemy this was referred to as the opus contra naturam, and effect contrary to nature. We might see the same kind of artful unnatural expression within out own lives. When normality explodes of break out in craziness or shadow, we might look closely, before running for cover and before attempting to restore familiar order at the potential meaningfulness of the vent. If we are going to be curious about the soul, we may need to explore its deviations, its perverse tendency to contradict expectations. And as a corollary, we might be suspicious of normality. A façade of normality can hide a wealth of deviance, and besides, it is fairly easy to recognize soullessness in the standardizing of experience.” (Moore, 1994)

Class Notes – 14^th June 2016
The soft golden grid flexes and folds, makes holes, catches, drops, cradles, comforts, crushes, drowns, launches. Soft golden grid holding and falling through everything. 
The green crack in the sky. The green crack broke the sky. Is it even the sky? The broken, to show confirmation. The bright green crack in nothingness, in the heft of the Armageddon. Green geometric crack, flaming into a green spray across the cosmos. Are you empty? It asks me, and I cry, yes! It cracks me open. There is fullness here, it says. Are you tired, are you overflowing, are you trapped, do you feel frozen? It asked me. I cried, yes! It cracked open to let my overflow flow. And it fell out of me and dropped into me and still all I can hear is me! me! me!
Let it go. Hold onto this.
I love you, you are the terrible. Do you need to drip through your body? Through time? Do you want to believe in god? Why do you always forget about the goddess? Why do you speak in but’s and or’s?
See this soft golden grid. It is big. Fuck quantity, counting, numbers, your earthbound gravity based logic and math. Leave it. It is already in you, you know it. You can release your tight white grip, let your blood flow. And then maybe you can let go and fall into the golden grid hammock. What else do you need? Tell me, what do you want? Just to sit in the all, you say? Not yet, I say. “Are you afraid?” it asks me. I yell out back at it, “how do you fucking know words?” “I do not,” it said, “you do.”
Mother, be softer. Fuck, it hurts. I have been running so long. Mother, the skin on my feet has worn down to the bone, but I am still running. Mother, slow down. Should I slow down? I want to slow down. I want. I want to feel free. Pink feather flames blazing out of the bruises and trees growing from the wounds. Dancing on crisis, dancing for love, for body, for sex, for bondage and release. I am blazing, mother! I am fucking dancing, wild flowers falling out of my scarred feet, broken ankles, broken knees. Mother, see, see!

I am 5 years old. I stand in front of the mirror, wave my imaginary wand in front of me and proclaim “Tish! Tish! I’m a wicked witch!” Witches are observers and discussers of time, of our history, of the movements of the cosmos, watching and gathering from the patterns of the changing world. This influences my feminism. My values are respect, truth, love and justice. All those words mean the same thing. Psychotherapy to me is part of the craft. I am interested in pleasure, in nature, in challenging systems of oppression and unjustified power struggles. I am interested in what people worship and how they suffer. I do not care for but’s as much as I love and’s. I'm interested in what people dream about and the symbols they hold on to. I am interested in growth and dying and decay and evolution. I want to know how you fuck and how you fight. I want to know what you hear when everything goes quiet. I want to know what your relationship is with Mother Nature, with aggression, with love, pain. I want to know your relationship to power. I want to know all of this about me too.

Also, I really like drugs. Ever since I can remember I loved altering my consciousness. Hurling my self as high as I could on the swings at Talab Park. Spinning wildly until I collapsed on the carpet, watching my world swirl around as my face flushed. Sitting upside down for hours. Sniffing whitener. Drinking alcohol. Smoking copious amounts of ganja. More drugs. I hear Raoul Duke at the back of my head in his cigarette voice, teeth clenched on a filter saying “we had two bags of grass, seventy five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of blotter acid, salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls” (Thomson, 1971). The drive to alter my consciousness feels no different than the drive to hunger, thirst, sex and safety. Here I am, referencing the Wicca and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a breath. Both, and. This is how I see psychotherapy. Can I embrace the both and all? “Tantra is a creative mystery which impels us to transmute out actions more and more into inner awareness: not by ceasing to act but by transforming our acts into creative evolution. Tantra provides a synthesis between spiritual and material potential…Indeed Tantra is not a withdrawal from life, but the fullest possible acceptance of our desires, feelings, and situations as human beings” (Mookerjee and Khanna, 1977).

As a psychotherapist I am interested in bringing the mystical back into the mundane and the material. I bring my combined love of Wicca, Tantra, drugs, religion, freedom, sex, pleasure, pain, truth, death, love. Everything, after all, is symbol, “the act of throwing together two incongruous things and living in the tension that exists between them, watching the images that emerge from that tension. In this approach to symbol, there is no stopping point, no end to reflection, no single meaning, and no clear instruction on what to do next” (Moore, 1994).

The arrival of colonization and capitalism birthed a structure so rigid and puritanical, making the masculine superior and the feminine subordinate. The comfortable Cartesian worldview insisted on a dualist separation of mind and body, where flesh is shamed and demoralized, has had a dehumanizing effect on how people perceive them selves as well as others. Religions have been victims to these rigidities, sacrificing spirituality for order, separating mind and spirit from body and nature, man from woman. I will not demand chastity or obedience from myself anymore. In witchcraft, the female force is seen as life giving, manifesting, and energy flowing into form. The male force is the death force, the force of limitation that is necessary to balance to unbridled creation, return to formlessness. Each principle contains the other. Existence in itself is the pulsing symbol alternating the current between these two forces. I am not interested in the male centric worldview of power over. I am curious about the power within, power that can be shared. “The Craft does not foster guilt, the stern, admonishing, self hating inner voice that cripples action. Instead, it demands responsibility” (Starhawk, 1979). The aim of Tantra too is the realization of integrated wholeness, integrated polarities. “Siva and its creative power, Sakti, are eternally conjoined; the one cannot be differentiated from the other, and Cosmic Consciousness is endowed with the essential potential of self evolution and self-involution” (Mookerjee and Khanna, 1977).

Psychotherapy to me is in waking back down into the body.  Through our body we express our soul in our movements, gestures shapes, dress, pimples, scars, temperature, disease and illness. The word ‘disease’ is from Latin, translated into ‘no elbow room.’ So when people walk into the space I want to know, are you enjoying life? Where is it not pleasurable? What are you fighting? Which part hurts? Which part doesn’t? Where does depression live in your body? Experience is meaningful to me. What is your dis-ease, where is there no space? “The point is not to understand the cause of the disease and the solve the problem, but to get close enough to the disease to restore the particular religious connection with life at which it hints. We need to feel the teeth of the god within the illness in order to be cured by the disease. In a very real sense, we do not cure diseases, they cure us, by restoring our religious participation in life” (Moore, 1994).

I am not interested in curing any body. I am not a healer or goddess. I am just something inside a body. I would like to care for the soul. I would like to help myself turn all my parts inwards to the common center. I am interested in radical inclusion. I don’t care if you change. I care if you can reach out to your deviances and witness your true self… only if you want to, but I’d be interested in all of you. I may scare easily, but I am not easily overwhelmed. The term patient comes from Latin meaning waiting in suffering. If you would let me, I’ll sit with you while you suffer. I promise I’ll be suffering too. Can you put your ear to your suffering? When you want to, when you can, listen to it. Observe it. What is it telling you? Nietzsche said, “to live is to suffer.” To suffer is to bear. How do we bear this world? Do we bear it well?

What are you hungry for? What is your gut feeling? Can you hear yourself? That inner voice of your soul? I hear mine. The way I have learnt to use mine has been through not listening to myself. How are you breathing? Your heart, your stomach, your liver, that funny vagus nerve, they need you to breath. A Buddhist theory relates that when you look closely enough at the self, you see that there are spaces between the selves, and when you breathe rhythmically all the particles in your body move at one speed, and the awareness help to access a reservoir of strength. String theory for the mystical.

I bring psychedelica into the therapy space. Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond wanted to come up with a word for LSD experiences; Humphrey came up with psychedelic, psyche manifesting. We don’t have to get there with drugs, and we can. Allan Watts (1968) describes 4 dominant characteristics of the transcendent experiences. We do not have to bomb through the depth, and we can. We do not have to be subtle, and we can. First, we will slow down time, returning part by part into the present infinite moment, returning from the anxious future and the depressed past. What is happening right now? Second, the awareness of polarity. We see un-separated differences. Thirdly, the awareness of relativity. Lastly the awareness of eternal, bountiful energy within the all.

Can I help you subside the noise? I do not really know how to fix things. I do not know that I can take pain away. Maybe, though, maybe we can slow it down, piece it apart and cut out some of that noise so we can see and hear your pain and joy better, so you can see you better. “If we allow ourselves to be in our experiences in the moment – to feel it, to see it, to taste it, to hear it, to smell it, to be aware of it – it becomes possible for us to find out what we are and to be who we are’ (Almaas, 2008). What parts of you stop you from doing this, who are these ‘internal saboteurs’ (Almaas, 2008). So many of us fear that in showing our true selves we will be mocked, jeered at, insufficient, inadequate, terrible. We fear rejection, criticism, attack, viciousness. In the fear that other people may do this to us, first we demonize ourselves. Obstinate superegos using aggression to make me small, and hateful. How about we just look at it right in the face and let it be there with gentleness. Can you be gentle with yourself? Have you ever been? How did you know to do it then? Are you afraid? I am too. I am not leaving though. I will deep-sea dive with you even if my heart is racing. Sometimes I hate myself too. And that’s okay.  “To be human is to be vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. Fully inhabiting out humanness involves a willingness to be open fully to the rawness of creaturely existence, and feel what it is like to be subject to hurt, limitation, conditioning and death. Transcending our humanness means gaining access to the larger domain of pure being and limitless awareness that is not bound by conditioned experience at all. Being fully human means honoring both these truths, immanence… and transcendence” (Welwood 2003).

Do you remember that the earth too, like you, is sacred? Remember that the rape of the feminine and the rape of the land went hand in hand. Look outside the window. Notice the colors. Close your eyes now, and hear the applause in the trees when the wind blows through them. Don’t open them! Dig your toes into the earth, soft mud. Remember where we came from, our primordial systems will be reset to connect again. The feminine learnt to distrust and repress its erotic power. With your eyes closed can you feel in your hair the direction of the wind? Do you believe there is a difference in your experience of spirituality and sexuality? Tell me more about it, I’m curious. Do you feel safe in your understanding of either? Remember, they were afraid of the wild, untamed, erotic, chaotic power of the feminine, of nature. Does it scare you? Are you ashamed by it? Okay, what if you put shame somewhere in the garden, a distance away from you, you know its there, but its far enough for you to be away from it. Okay, now put a stream between you and it. Does the stream need to be thicker? Does it need to be faster? Make it happen. When we can honor the wild erotic powers of the untamed wild sexual spirit we can start coming back. “The tendency of contemporary culture to limit the meaning of eroticism to the physical aspects of sexual expression misses the crucial point that erotic power extends far beyond this. And limiting sexual expression to the physical techniques of need gratification or pleasure cuts us off from the erotic power of the sacred. At the deepest level, the erotic is associated with creating and consuming, with birth and death. It is also connected to our most profound sense of bonding, union, relationally and love” (Tessier, 1997).

Let us attend to our bodies. No matter the body, no matter the gender, these vessels that carry us are sacred. Our world has been filled with messages to defile, distrust and disfigure these bodies. The Craft holds the male body as sacred as the female. Lets talk about masculinity? Masculinity can be wild and untamed too, without the violence and the cruelty and anger. Masculinity can be sexual without being violating, spiritual without being deprived of sex. Our patriarchal capitalism has demanded the masculine to deny their emotions, their tenderness, their pain and tears and fears. Are you afraid to admit you need? What happens when you are faced with the powerful feminine?

Listen to your body. I am listening to mine when I am in the room with you. You teach me all the time, to be humane with myself and to listen. If I judge and belittle myself my intuition is clouded. Is there really a difference between self-love and intuition? I believe the primordial knowing comes from a primordial love of life/death.