More thoughts

At the end of the MBCT group this morning, someone asked what my experience was, and since she was a doctor and the other student was a yoga instructor, we had something in common to talk about. We addressed that guilt suffered by teachers and therapists that they are not as perfect as their teachings, but agreed that people get into these roles partially to serve, and largely to learn.

I'm constantly astounded at the wise things I say to clients that I don't apply to my own life. Or at just what they are teaching me if I can listen. For instance, the yoga teacher talked about managing her mood by asanas that opened up the chest, and as I got lost in the back streets trying to find a way through the Bay to Breakers street closures, I realized, hey, that might work for me too! And sure enough, just pulling back my shoulders started shifting my mood towards something lighter and more open.

It's funny how our basic needs can elude us. What I often come back to is my need--I should stress that, my need, is to feel that I'm serving and that I'm productive. Whether under that is a need to feel connected, that's probably there with service and productivity being the vehicles for that relationship. I don't feel fully alive without that, and I certainly don't function very well without them. Whether it's because of something everyone needs, or just my idiosyncratic needs, I feel like the best way of relating to this is in a real functional mode: without these relations in my life, I don't function, so I do them in the same way I eat my greens. Maybe something sacred should be there too, but it seems most important to me to orient myself in these ways is just necessary, period.

For me--I'm seeing this today at work, which on the weekend can often feel like a little island floating in the middle of an ocean--I'm really seeing how I need to feel in motion in order not to start a depressive reaction. But the trick here is not to fall into the compulsive thrashing in order to feel energy, but to look for the motion that is already in my experience. And it's there, even in the gray-sky days of my life. But it requires faith and look/feeling carefully into what's in front of me. It means taking a deep breath and observing, and not allowing myself to panic. It also means holding a vision/belief/image of motion to counter the inner vision/belief/image of stagnation that can be triggered.

That last bit is a fascinating piece for me, how important the use of imagery is in managing mood. Maybe in the ultimate sense it's unnecessary, when you're grounded in mindfulness to the degree that you are never seeing life from thought, but only from experience. Till then, though, images are a huge determinant in our lives, whether you're aware of them or not. And so telling yourself a good story, with enough evidence not to make it a delusion, is really really important. It is the undergirding that supports you when you lose your direct exposure to reality. Stories are not true, but they are very very useful at times. They can be traps, but they can also be very good friends, when they are resonant with reality. Saying, "All things are impermanent" is not the reality or experience of impermanence, but it is a languaged expression of something that is true, which makes it a very good story.

And again, until the story function of our brain collapses, it's going to be telling a narrative, and it behooves us to have a good one.

Check in

I finished up with my first Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression group, which had been running 8 weeks on Sunday mornings. We started with five and two dropped out, and then today were just two as the third was on vacation. It was a stressful run, overall, though seemingly it went well and people got benefits from the class. I'll probably run it again but I need a breather for a while.

Ironically, the group brought 3 or 4 clients, and then several others came from elsewhere, but the sudden jump in numbers within 3 weeks, along with the nascent group, kind of floored me with energy output. My Tuesdays used to end about noon, but now I go from 9am to 10pm, with a break in the middle. Plus my half-way house job, it adds up to a lot of hours a week. The nice part is I'm making some change to put towards paying off bills, and the downside is I've less time to market and build up my practice to leave the half-way house job, or get one of the other projects up and running to allow that transition.

So I've been fairly tired recently, not so much on the physical front as what happens when I've got a few too many irons in the fire. My system starts flinching at new outputs of energy and there's a drag towards depression as a sort of systematic closing down. Which takes more energy to fight, or just more rest. Da da da.

So I'm trying to adjust to my recent success, and as a few clients attrition out (after solid and productive work), and the group ends, I'm actually taking a deep breath and looking towards the next marketing push, which will be offering free, hour-long workshops on an EMDR-related technique called "resource tapping."

And at HH, the work is about what it's always been, and I'm pretty ready to leave, but finances are such that until the income switches over to my practice and other projects, I'll need to stay just for body and soul. So I continue to try to make use of it, and it still has things to teach me.

For instance, today I noticed, driving through the maze that's created every Bay to Breakers day, each year (because they block off the streets leading from the Embarcadero to GG Park, and then through the park down to the ocean), that I was feeling a sinking, stagnating feeling heading down to work. When I checked in to see what I was lacking, it was a sense of continuity and "flow-through" to my experience down on the Peninsula. There's a sense of stasis down at the house that sets in, which I think was compensated for during school and internship by the inevitable flow towards either graduation or licensure. Now that I've "made it," the flow needs to be a more internal sense, and sometimes it just fails me. That's when I have to be careful not to drift down into a depression.

I think there are associations that arise to hot, seemingly empty and endless summer days in Sacramento. School was out, and I'd often be at home along, drifting. So these hot suburban days seem to conjure that same feeling, and it's difficult sometimes to be in the present and realize that all those days are long gone. Truly, some days I long to be on the proverbial pig farm.

What helps, and what's helping today, is to remember why I'm here and why I'm doing the therapeutic work I'm doing in general: which is, to serve growth, in people, in this culture, in spirit. I was telling Heather over the weekend that what I notice myself losing my cool about most often is exposure to people or opinions which seem to be stultifying. Not just coasting, or fixed, but actually anti-growth. That's where I lose it and start into fighting mode, probably because I feel the sense of being threatened by being caged, or worse, trussed up like a bonsai tree, i.e., intentionally stunted. The sense of nausea that arises from that is so palpable, and so motivating to fight back.

But the probably here is the fighting part. I love that Zen story about the bull in the village. Basically, a bull gets loose in a village and is blocking the main road, keeping villagers from moving through. They are very upset, but don't know what to do as the bull isn't calming down. So they see the Master walking down the hill from his hermitage and think, oh good, he'll know what to do. As he gets close, he looks up from his mediation and sees the bull, sees the upset and expectant villagers, sees the bottleneck in the road...and walks down another road.

That's where I'd like to go, to not get so freaked by the sense of stagnation that I actually get into a death lock with the experience. All I need to do is acknowledge it and then walk another direction. I'm only in danger if I grab it.

Look how much that's going to cost!

I was watching the last part of the recent film "Beowolf," with my clients at the halfway house. It's a clever high-tech hybrid of real actors and computer animation, and tells the story of King Beowolf and his travails. The climactic scene is him battling his son-cum-dragon, who is rampaging across the country burning villages and so forth. He goes after Beowolf's concubine and wife, who are standing on a stone walkway between two high towers. Of course, the dragon burns chunks out, bites other chunks, all but destroying the construction. Earlier, he burned a wood bridge across a chasm.

So where does my mind go? To think, who's going to repair that? What a waste of workmanship! All the drama is nice and all, but in the long term, some poor group of schmucks are going to have to do a lot of heaving and hauling to get the bridge up, the walkway reconstructed. Probably some will get injured or fall. The kingdom's coffers are going to be drained for the construction, and resources that otherwise could have built infrastructure have to go for these repairs.

Oh, how easy it is to destroy, how difficult to build...

A weekend in review

Well, I had quiet a variegated weekend. Texturally nuanced, as it were. A topography of tonalities.

Friday morning started early, waking up to sit at 6:30, and then being in the Inner Sunset to meet a new colleague, who contacted me about her MBCT group. (I'm currently running a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Depression class, and she saw a posting of mine.) We had a chilly cup of coffee (decaf for me) at the coffee wallah on 9th and Irving--chilly because the fickle San Francisco weather turned from sunny to demonstratively overcast within a half hour, and the only seats available were outside. We chatted about our classes, and especially about the what has had to happen inside in order for us to show up as teachers outside.

Then I got on the lawnmower scooter, Heather's original Honda that now is held together by prayer and red duct tape, and rode off to the beach were I was to meet my friend Robert at the Seal Rock Inn, our usual haunt. Robert and I met at my old counseling intern site, and struck up a friendship there which has stuck. We get together every 4-6 weeks to do what his current and my ex supervisor calls "nondual ping pong," which involves a few hours of smacking nondual ideas and experiences back and forth, laced with psychotherapy and personal history. It's always very rich and warm.

Then from there, I rode home along the park and got home a little before Heather, and when she arrived, off we went for our every-other-Friday therapy appointment with Philip, our beloved couples therapist. We had a good session, as we're both learning to be nicer to each other. I think that's the real upshot of couples work, and relationship in general: be nice, be kind, and don't hit. If you lived that out purely in your relationships, you'd be doing pretty damn well.

And next? Off to the scooter store to buy me a helmet, which I was ready to do but the very nice manager guy insisted he order a different model so I could compare before buying. SF Moto is a great place, really friendly and competent, from the grease monkeys in the back to the owner who still works the sales floor. That's where we bought our Sym, which is a great freeway ready scooter.

Then shopping at Rainbow, our venerable whole-foods worker owned coop under the highway on the edge of the Mission district. We have been going over our food budget the last two months, but we managed to keep the expenses fairly low with this shopping run. Yeah, budget!

And we'll probably be spending less, at least for a bit, as I've taken up my mother-in-law's diet, called Fast Five, which basically is eating within a five hour period, and fasting the rest of the day. I've been doing this for the last four days or so, and am fairly amazed at how steady my energy is, how my body is feeling somehow, um, snappier, and that I've already lost a pound. I'm not sure if I'll want to make a lifestyle out of it, but since I've wanted to drop 5-8 pounds, this seems like a good way to do it. I simply feel better when I feel leaner. And I remember my grandfather saying how he chose a target weight, and when he saw himself edging over it, would simply fast to keep on the mark. That sounds like a good plan, especially since I'm seeing how the hunger is negligible and easily manageable (probably because I'm used to retreats where you don't eat after the noon meal).

Let's see, so then we went home and I did my evening meditation, in the afternoon because I had a presentation at CIIS in the evening. The ex-dean of students invited me last month to present on my clinical work, as an alumni at the 40th anniversary celebration. The day before, I had been musing topics and thought I might look on the website and see how I was listed. Lo and behold, I'd somehow been assigned to talk about MBCT.

I'd scribbled up some notes, but with certain of these presentations, it feels like you just kind of set the intention to show up, and then the thing shapes itself. So last minute, I decided to do a particular exercise from the MBCT (the "mindfulness of raisins" bit) and then just sketch the protocol and ask for questions.

Heather was too fagged out to attend, so I rode the scooter down to that familiar building in SOMA, and presented myself in the lobby as a speaker. The genially harried table people couldn't find my name, so just gave me a name tag to write on, and I headed upstairs to my assigned digs. Come my start time, 5:30pm (I had a half hour), the alumni who was had missed her 5pm start time due to traffic, came in with the eccentric (ahem) psychotherapist from last year's nondual conference, the one who had almost physically attacked a presenter. One person came for my talk, so we two pairs retired to separate corners (after the organizer came in to give me a hug and wish me well, like we'd seen each other yesterday, though I had the dimmest of memories of her). My attendee and I started talking a bit before three folks from school or internship wandered in, wine glasses in had, to say an enthusiastic hi and to wish me well. Then as I turn back to my attendee, a wash of people drift in to hear about MBCT.

Now, when a speaker has 30 minutes to present, shouldn't you endeavor to get there on time? Anyway, I started over and did the raisin exercise, and then discussed how it went and why it was a good illustration of what the group's about. Then some questions, with me answering a tad clinically at times, and at the hour the next group entered and off we went.

It was really an enjoyable experience, not because of the outcome or my skill level--both can be tweaked--but because it reminded me (for the first time) of being on stage with my old band, Bi-Curious George. The sense of presence in the moment with the people, of partially making it up on the spot, and of endeavoring to guide the energy while fundamentally having no control over people's reactions or responses--pretty exhilarating like I remember from being on stage all those years ago. It's just so real. So, I want to do more of that, for it's own sake as well as for marketing purposes.

Then from there, I rode back home and woke Heather up so we could go to the first of a 12 series of swing classes at our YMCA. She was groggy, but since once you get her over her inertia she wakes up, I kind of gave her the first push and let the momentum carry her outdoors and to the Y down the street.

The class was fun, more fun than I expected, led by a Swedish woman who claims to have helped revive the Lindy Hop. Well, OK. But the steps were relatively easy, the classmates amiable, and I seemed to pick it up fairly easily. It will be fun to see how it develops.

And then we did a run on the treadmills before heading home and settling in, me reading a bit and then watching the fun and ridiculous Transformers. Which I think Heather said had a good portion of "car porn."

Saturday began more slowly than Friday, with me waking relatively late (9:30a) and sitting for an hour. The day was gorgeous, blue and clear, so I thought to call James and see if he wanted to go to Chrissie Field for a picnic. Robin couldn't make it, having a gig down south, but he and the Boychik could, so we arranged a time and then Heather and I noodled around till he came. Which he said was more or less on time, but I don't quite remember it that way.

Still, we made it to the beach, which after a few shivering minutes of wind and drifting sand, decided us to retreat to Golden Gate Park. Boychik, nee Benjamin, was in pretty good spirits, and when he sat on the grass in his beanie, he looked like a garden gnome.

GG Park was less windy, but not by much, so we huddled together eating sandwiches and chips while Boychik picked grass and repeatedly placed it in father's hand. Repeatedly, but without a seeming diminshment in interest. Early onset OCD? James thought that it might have been the first time he had sat on grass.

With Boychik's nap time looming, James took us home and we retired to our abode. I sat, then sans Heather (who was to get her fingerprints done for her new internship, and then was too tired to get out of the house) went to the gym for a good upper body workout and a long soak in the Jacuzzi. I just dipped my legs, and sat on the edge reading my MBCT group to prep for this morning's class (the second of eight). Regardless of what people might think, everyone is amiable there, no one really blinks at idiosyncrasies.

Then home to do some more preparation for the class, and as Heather was feeling a bit funkified, I retired to bed, to read a book on Buddhism's vector into American life, and then the first couple chapters of a book that's been on Heather's shelf forever, Good Omens, the story of the coming of the Antichrist, and the demon and angel who'd prefer that not happen. Like short grained brown rice, novels are something I never give enough attention to, and which, when imbibed, tell me how neglectful I've been.

And then this morning, I did the MBCT group and it went very well. My fear that I wouldn't be able to fill the time was demonstratively unfounded. We actually went over 10 minutes, and I could have gone another half hour. So that's good in terms of calibration for future sessions. Lots of good conversation happened, and reports on people's efforts and struggles--all normal and predictable, but poignant, seeing people work hard and what's quite difficult practice. And I seemed to even have some lucid things to say, and felt both supportive and appropriately focused in leading the class. I'm actually liking this role. Whodathunk.

And lastly, I drove down to Redwood City to work, and it's been quiet and relatively uneventful. I did try to do some CBT with my men's group in the evening, but it was beyond all but a few, so I'll have to ratchet the cognitive level back a bit to keep it meaningful to them. We decided though, perhaps as a break, to watch "Letters from Iwo Jima" for the next group. That's a good dude flick, yeah?

Surf is up!

I went surfing for the first time yesterday, with my friend and ex-supervisor Michael. We didn't have a camera with us, so I found the above picture to represent my experience. Well. My internal experiences. Externally, from the shore, to make it accurate, you'd subtract about 25 feet off the wave, make it mostly whitewater, and have the surfer wobbling onto his feet for a second before plowing over and trying not to get hit in the head by the 10 foot board.

We went down to Linda Mar beach, in Pacifica, a local surfing mecca. After the long suiting up process, Michael taught me the basics, but the little board of his was too small so I couldn't really get up on a wave. So we rented a longer board, which proved much stabler. I was actually able to ride a couple waves pretty much to the shore, maybe crouching a little, but there ya go for a first timer.

It actually felt quite intuitive, maybe from learning to rock climb or back in the day, ride a bicycle. It seems to be one of those activities that require very little head, and just a lot of allowing the body to learn from doing. I'm pretty sure that within not too much time, I could be up consistently and learning more of the nuances.

The culture is very interesting, kind of a liminal area between the land lubbers and the sea farers. The rules of conventional society seem to get a bit loosened at the water's edge, like the commonness of stripping down in the parking lot, en route to the water, or drying off. The surfer stereotype does seem to have a lot to do with that dreamy in between space on the waves or on the beach.

I can't say I'm hooked, but I'll be back to give it another try.

Dogville

There is something utterly disgusting about Lars von Trier's "Dogville," which is belied by the richness of production and the sheer weight of acting talent. It's the story, shot as a play without an audience, of what seems to be a gun moll escaping to a small Colorado town for refuge. The town slowly plays out its suffering on her, like a J.G. Ballard story, where the human race slowly devolves into its most primitive forms. She turns out to be the daughter of a mafioso, and she orders the execution of the whole town in the film's finale.

But the disgust is not in the story, it's in the sheer adolescent arrogance of the director, in his pompous and supercilious dismissal of human weakness. The end montage, of America's downtrodden, is really horrific to see, like some Versaille aristocrat pointing out their window at the suppurating peons in the slums below. The setup is so easy and yet the payoff so self-righteous, and psychologically stupid.

The film sketches certain moral issues, about responsibility, liberalism, but never plays them out with any integrity. What you get is a cypher for the director to play out his own disgust, to make of the characters what the characters make of the mob daughter: a scapegoat and screen for projection.

Because the production is so skillful, it wasn't till the very end of the film, as the denouement was reached, that the simple point of the film was reached, and the director got to piss on everyone and walk off content. It's like listening to a long, sophisticated speech about race relations, which then ends, "And that's why I hate niggers."

The disgust of the film is supposed to be directed at the morally weak, while in truth it's deserved focus is the director himself.

Some movies

I seem to have seen a slew of movies recently, more than usual. I just got back from "The Bank Job," which was curiously bloodless. Maybe because it was British, and they can't help it. It felt like an exercise in genre, well done, nice people, derived from a real event. But a the end, I kind of shrug. The denouement was rather anticlimactic, bland. So, that's that.

We also watched "Across the Universe" on dvd, which was a colorful, fun trip through the late '60's in America done through the music of the Beatles. But at the end of the day with this one, not much substance, and kind of a string of stereotypes and stereotyped situations. Like they looked through the papers of the time, and stripped the major headlines and cultural figures: there's Janis Joplin, and Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the radicals turned bombers, the student movement, the soldiers. And that's pretty much it. It was nice thought to see Joe Cocker playing a singing hobo.

Ok, and then there's "South Park the Movie," from years ago, which we never saw. Actually, the TV show is, in general, much funnier than this movie, I think because on basic cable you have to censor yourself. Where here, the boys are swearing up a storm, which kind of takes the edge off. It was funny seeing what you'd always thought, that Saddam Hussaine is Satan's lover...and batshit crazy.

Also, "Eastern Promises," David Croneberg's second film with Viggo Mortensen, a story of the Russian mob in London. It was a more straightforward story than "History of Violence," that horrible mess of a film. This one has the nice, order-affirming twist at the end, and the baby is saved. Yeah! Well executed, but pretty forgettable.

Anything else? Oh, I saw "Domino" on the on-demand cable, and was really impressed. Which was curious, because it got TOTALLY panned in the press when released. I just checked Rottentomatoes and of the credible critics, 9% liked it. But Roger Ebert liked it, which makes sense (here). I almost always agree with Ebert; I wonder if we're the same Ennegram number? I love the way he can love the scraggly dogs that no one else wants to let in the house, or can see the beauty of.

I told Heather that "Domino" is like a Joss Whedon production on methamphetamine, a story of a totally dysfunctional, but loving family of thrown-togethers. If it were shot in a linear, cinemagraphically conventional way, it would be banal. But Tony Scott's crazed Vegas color scheme and ADD editing style gives the film a vibrancy and surreal sweetness. Some films look at their characters as if they were either planets floating in space, or a bunch of billiard balls knocking into each other (The Bank Job was a bit like this). Others, like "Domino," somehow see their characters as both people, representatives, and locations of spirit. Which is weird to say of a film so violent, so on edge, and so darkly comic. But these people really seem, in their brokenness and unpolished and unaware selves, reflect that Leonard Cohen line, "There's a crack in everything/And that's how the light gets in." There's a lot of light here because there are really tremendous cracking in this world. And Tom Waits as the desert prophet in a Cadillac is wonderful.

Plus, the totally audacious scene of a man having his arm shot off at the shoulder by a double barrel shotgun, in front of the ex-stars of Beverly Hills 90210 is, well, jaw droopingly ballsy. Christopher Walken's character, a sleazy reality show producer, just looks and says, "Wow."

So, that's my movie roundup.