Don't Grow up!

I am at a centre where this sign is on the noticeboard. Don't grow up - its a trap. I imagine many of us can smile, recognise that our adult life hasn't been all we hoped for and that work, duty, mortgages etc have restricted us. Many will have felt trapped at some point. However, for people with bad childhoods, growing up was the escape. Perhaps it ended in moving out of the frying pan in to the fire! There are quite a lot of people I meet who are trapped in a child-like way of seeing the world. They can be quite happy there but are often frustrating for those who are around them. They can also be rather powerless; unless using charm. Jung talked of the puer (or puella) aeternus the eternal child. Such people can have a lot of spontaneity and simple joy and that is worth a lot in a world that is often short on this and has become dull and grey.

However, spontaneity and being like a child do not allow for some of the important processes of life which can require delayed gratification. It isn't always a lot of fun being a parent and children need parents who are adults; even though it is important that they can also play and let go .We cannot abandon our inner child (or children) but they cannot run the person. The person requires personal growth and development.. This is the Soul's journey of individuation.  Being trapped in the nursery stops all of that.

When my son had major surgery, I was very thankful that the surgeon in charge, had certainly spent many thousands of hours studying and practicing to get to the top of his profession. When I fly I really don't want too much of a party happening on the flight deck!

American Beauty

There are very few films I would want to see more than once; I’m not a film buff, but I always wanted to see Sam Mendes film American Beauty again. I remember from the first time about ten years ago, the stark beauty of the photography and the dark message about what was underneath the plastic superficiality of the American Dream. On the second viewing I was able to see clearly that the film is about the power of sex, passion and love and how it enabled the central character Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, to reach some sort of state of peace and even enlightenment. It is a film about the male path to enlightenment.

From the opening, the film is about life and death as Lester the narrator, who is 42 says that he will be dead within the year. There is a film of a plastic bag swirling and dancing in the wind as if alive and of a girl, his daughter casually wanting him to be killed.  In a way he is dead already stuck in a job in advertising and with a family where they are all so separate and isolated.  His only child, Jane is a lifeless cynical teenager and his wife, Carolyn, enthralled by the America dream, takes the job of making money seriously to fuel the perfect lifestyle she has with a large lifeless house and big car.  She is more masculine than Lester, living through will and ambition to sell houses. “I will sell this house today” and in pursuit of career advancement, has passionate sex with a successful rival in real estate. He is the King and introduces her to the thrill and power of shooting.  For Carolyn sex moves her from the second to the third chakra from sex and passion to power and she comes to the house near the end of the film with a gun , “I will not be a victim!”

The only simple heartful household are a gay male couple who welcome with flowers the new family to the neighbourhood. They are an even more dysfunctional family, again with an only child. The husband, Col. Frank Fitts comes near to a parody of the discipline obsessed ex-Marine; strongly homophobic and reactionary. He almost destroyed his son Ricky and had him committed to a psychiatric hospital for a while. Ricky has learnt to live with his controlling father by leading a double life, pretending to be even more reactionary than his father whilst drug dealing on the side. His mother has been turned into a shadow, looking like a walking corpse in her loveless and sexless married life.  Ricky, a strange figure keeps a connection to life in his voyeuristic filming of people and of death. He sees the beauty in death and it is his film of a swirling plastic bag that is at the beginning of the film. He lives through his movie camera giving a detached but perceptive awareness of life around him. His defeat of numbed out life in the army and the psychiatric hospital and his awareness and his love of death and beauty symbolised by the video camera lay the foundation for his confronting his father and going for a chance of love with Jane, leaving his hopeless family behind.

Ricky’s household is almost colourless, but next door with Lester, Carolyn and Jane there is some colour. in the film red symbolises life and passion and Lester’s house has red roses and a red door.  Red roses appear in many of the shots in the house, and in the garden are tended by his wife symbolising the feminine principle as the guardians of passion. The passion and lust they symbolise pour from the heart of Angela, (the Angel!) a friend of his daughter in the first hallucinatory scene where he imagines she is dancing for him alone. She is also ambitious to be a model and a star and plays the sexually sophisticated teenager determined to climb the ladder of success with her beauty and sexual allure. Lester’s obsessive thinking and lusting after her give him the impetus to leave his job and embark on self-improvement through working out to get his body into a better shape in the garage of his house; the back to basics of the base chakra and becoming embodied.  In his imagination kissing Angela; red rose petals come from her mouth; another transmission of love. Passion is the key.

When Lester makes his sexual approach to her she tells him that she is a virgin and this shocks him out of his lust and he sees this beautiful young woman as his daughter and as the feminine in need of love and attention and above all protection; not as a sex object but as Shakti,  the Feminine principle which he truly loves unconditionally. This moment is his awakening, his enlightenment and the opening of his heart. He had been at his third chakra in his body-building and his assertively standing up to his wife and now he moves to the level of the heart. At the end of the film having rejected everything not in alignment with his Soul he feels wonderful for the first time in years. “I’m great, really great” when asked how he is.  In that moment he becomes enlightened. Even when his neighbour shoots him for exposing his repressed homosexual desires, he says “I suppose I should feel really pissed off by the end of my stupid little life”, but then he sees all the beauty and love of his life in flashbacks. He was able to avoid being stuck in half-dead survival mode and mired in the shallow consumerism of his plastic house; he moved through the willpower needed to leave, be assertive and develop his body without becoming attached or aggressive. His heart began to open in finding compassion for his deeply troubled neighbour Col. Frank Fitt and he was finally transformed by love for Angela and through her the Divine itself.  At the end of the film the Beatles music supports this theme of love” Because the world is round it turns me on.” How can even death spoil that Vision of Love…

Experts

I went to the dentist recently and was profoundly grateful to find a skilful, experienced and probably highly trained dentist. I really wouldn't have been happy with someone who said that they knew all about dentistry because they had been on a whole weekend course in how to do it, had had couple of fillings themselves and had even read a books on it!

When it comes to therapy, it seems to be very different. Many people seem to believe that they know what psychotherapy is and how it should be done and are perfectly happy to set up as therapist; others are happy to go. It is based more on belief, fashion and conviction than on knowledge or experience. I suppose that this is part of a post-modern, pluralist world suspicious of expertise and hegemony. Reluctantly, after nearly thirty years as a therapist, I have come to the conclusion that most people really don't know what psychotherapy is; they confuse it with personal growth or development or some particular ideology that they subscribe to which often boils down to willpower or belief. They offer people self-help books, quick-fix courses and the encouragement to become powerful, discover themselves and follow their own truth. There is scant understanding of the difference between the pre-personal; the personal and the transpersonal.

What many will say is that the State should licence therapists but this requires us to trust the government. No thanks!  In Soviet Russia, Freud's works were secretly printed and circulated underground. The present government's love affair with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is only slowly coming to an end. The alternative is for people to become more discriminating.

To evaluate a therapist, as well as trusting your intuition ask them how long they have seen some clients for; (warning;  less isn't better some people take quite a time). Ask they about how they deal with suicidal clients,  how they understand dissociation and embodied trauma; what their experience of long term therapy as a client was like, if they have good regular supervision; their understanding of ego-strength and how it can be built. Ask about what they can do between sessions and what support is offered.

International Mens Day

Tomorrow is International Mens Day. Its not the most widely publicised event and could attract the comment that every day is men's day from their profile in politics and the public agenda.This prevents the need to look at men and their vulnerabilities which their competitive capture of the public spaces hides. More men die of testicular and prostate cancer than women die of breast cancer but breast cancer and screening is well know. Too many men don't even know where their prostate is (its behind you!!!!) Three times as many men commit suicide as women and it is the biggest single killer of men aged 15 - 34 in Britain. In inner city areas, crime is the major cause of death amongst black men under 25. The dysfuntion of men creates lots of young men who grow up without fathers or father-figures, creating the next generation of lost men who remain as overgrown teenagers with no good means of entry into true manhood. Sport and the celebrity culture don't provide many good role models. So honour the positive functions of the masculine; power, authority, presence; all used to witness without judgement, create safety and hold space. In that held sacred space the feminine can heal and blossom and children can flourish. This is function of the Divine Masculine principle; that can be in both men and women. Tomorrow celebrate it! http://www.internationalmensday.com/ 

Men and why we need them!

Many women’s emotional well-being is dominated by an internal wounded masculine. The job of the masculine is to create a safe space and guard it for the feminine to be in and to witness without judgement. You need your inner mas­­­­­­­culine to do this so that you can let go and your deep feminine can feel and express emotion and radiate love and passion.

Your inner masculine comes from two main places;  your mother’s inner masculine and your father.  So; what do you know of your mother’s father; your maternal grandfather and his life? What was he like as a person? Did you know him and if not what are the stories that are told about him? How did he treat your  mother? He will have lived in the early or middle of the twentieth century;  a century dominated by two world wars and numerous smaller ones. How present was he; physically, emotionally?  He may have been away a lot or absent or he may have been a workaholic and so only around when exhausted, if at all. He may have been an alcoholic and so there but not really there. He may have been traumatised by events and angry or abusive. He may have been scared or dismissive of women because of their intensity or their sexuality or his fear of being helpless in their hands as he was once with his mother.

All of this related to your grandfather unconsciously creates a large part of your inner masculine and to the extent that he was damaged; it will be part of your wounded masculine. The other part comes from your experiences of your father; these are closer to consciousness and the same questions can be asked. How present was he? How whole and healthy? Did he embody the healthy masculine and hold space without judgement? Was he deeply able to accept you as a little girl and as a beautiful sexual teenager?

So these two men; your mother’s father and your father create your inner masculine.  How wounded is he? The more he is wounded the more you have to hold yourself and have a masculine presence in the world which prevents your feminine essence from flourishing.

In our culture there has been much masculine wounding; from wars, from technology which has made  the masculine quality of strength superfluous, from the lack of rites of passage for young men in to adulthood and from lack of positive role models.  It leads men and women to question; what are men for?  The dishonouring of the deep masculine has backfired on women through the damage to their inner masculine which needed to hold and honour their feminine essence.  This interdependence is the "inner marriage" within every person of our masculine and feminine essences to support a full flow of aliveness.

In tantric healing massage, the male tantric practitioner embodies the deep masculine qualities of presence, and from that presence witnesses without judgement and creates safety.  In that safe container the feminine can at long last let go and allow the feminine radiance and vulnerability to flower.  The particular parts to be nurtured, supported and witnessed are the emotions and sexual desire and passion; for these are central to the divine feminine power.  It is this divine feminine power that each women needs to fully embody and that the world desperately needs. 

See www.shivoham.asia for how I work with this, Namaste

Vagina Biography by Naomi Wolf

At last a mainstream author Naomi Wolf, who wrote The Beauty Myth twenty years ago, has written about the yoni and its central place in women's sense of identity, power and creativity. Gradually some of my work in tantra and bodywork is coming in from the margins! I first learnt yoni healing on my  extended tantra training in 1996. Since then, neuroscience has advanced so much that we can now begin to understand why this work is so powerful.

Of course, it is resisted. Naomi's new book was called "dotty" by a reviewer in The Observer. There is a huge resistance to any biological level explanations for everything; fearing that people are being put in to boxes and restricted. Tantra is clear that the masculine and feminine are radically different; but complementary and any one individual can have a mixture of both (never mind intersexual and all the different sexualites that exist). Tantra is also clear that the feminine is the active principle of creation; all of life and all abundance comes from her and the only true response to that, is one of honouring and worship.

Unfortunately, the yoni; or rather a woman's relationship; to it, to her sexuality and to her body, are fragile - particularly in puberty and therefore easily damaged by guilt, shame and fear from parents and society and the media's crazy and confusing depictions of women. Plus of course the overt sexual abuse that comes the way of a significant proportion of girls and young women.

Neuroscience has helped to clarify how trauma gets embedded in the body and some of important but hidden connections. For example did you know that you have more serotonin receptors in the belly than the brain? The vagus nerve, an ancient system separate from the spinal column nerves connects the primitive brainstem to the heart, to the belly and then in women, to the  cervix. Head, Heart, Belly and Sex really are connected.

The book looks at tantric massage as sexual healing and give her experiences of sessions. It connect this to history, mythology, neuroscience and to society.  So, huge congratulations to Naomi, who, through the accident of her particular neurological condition came to give her attention to her body in a new way and ask some questions that science and tantra can answer. The yoni and the belly, the creative second and third chakras are the keys to creativity and power for women. I have been doing this work for over 15 years; now it is coming in from the dark. For sessions see www.shivoham.asia .     Namaste.

New Moon and the start of Navaratri - Celebrate Shakti in all her forms!

Today is the start of Navaratri, a ten day festival to celebrate the feminine, Shakti and the forms of her wisdom and virtue in our lives.  It starts with the goddess Durga which can be seen as a form of Kali who destroys impurities and things that no longer serve us.
For the first three days you can meditate on this or perform pujas connected to Durga.  She is often seen as fierce and has weapons like  bow and arrow and spear riding on a tiger to ruthlessly seek out what is not serving us any longer.




For the second part of the festival the goddess is Lakshmi who is seen as the Mother and is often seen as connected to spiritual wealth.  She is often depicted on a fountain of milk holding symbols of wealth and abundance. Much more serene than Durga!



For the last part the goddess is Saraswati who represents wisdom and knowledge. She is generally shown playing a rudra vina a stringed instrument as she is connected to music and the arts.

On the tenth day all forms are worshipped and in some areas pubescent girls are particularly revered as beginning to embody the virtuous qualities of the goddesses, who are companions of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma.

So, find a woman, and the goddess inside yourself (men and women) and revere her. If you know a young woman; next week particularly celebrate her femininity.