Sample Page

I have a desire to create – to bring into being – give form– to create something.  I had the desire to create this blog – an expression of my general desire to create as well as my desire to enquire and to communicate.  I consider being creative a deep human desire.  There are endless possible ways of being creative.  We are creating in an unconscious sense all the time.  The theories of phenomenology and the Buddhist teachings of Emptiness both insist we are creating our world – our “selves” and all the “things” we perceive.  We are creating our experience through the meanings and interpretations our mind gives to those things. But that is not the creativity that I am desiring – although it rests on it.  Desire itself rests on it.

I don’t know what it is about poetry that inflames my desire.  Indeed, I don’t know where my poems come from.  While I can consciously create the circumstances most likely to let it happen, invite the words and images, and then consciously work to craft them when they arrive, the images and even words themselves seem to come from deeper than, or beyond, my conscious mind.  Countless artists, writers, musicians and theorists have attested to this “inspiration” experience.  The Greek Muses were a mythological personification of this source of creativity, but to me it feels like it is coming out of the same dark place inside that dreams come from.

To create requires desire and a willingness to open to this unknown place of inspiration. It is definitely not something one can grasp at.  It can feel like being on the brink of an abyss – and having to relax and let go – to trust – and then to receive what arrives.

The desire to create makes demands on the maker.  At its full strength, it can push other aspects of life to one side – relationships, daily tasks, even the need to eat at times.  Buddhist teacher, Rob Burbea, remembers someone who came on one of his retreats saying, We are doors for what wants to come through.   This image implies that we open to whatever it is.  Rob has also referred to Henri Corbin’s use of the image of the angel out ahead.¹  We think and feel we are forging our own path when, in fact, we have been following an angel all the time.  So, is the desire to create even our desire?  Or are we just able at times to open to the desire of creation itself – or to an angel out ahead?

 

¹  Corbin, Henri (1998) The Voyage and The Messenger, Iran and Philosophy; Berkeley, CA; North Atlantic Books.  This image originally comes from Exodus 23:20.

 

 

I had a phone call this morning from a dear friend telling me that Prapto, the Javanese movement artist and teacher who has had a profound influence on me in recent years, had died.  During the night before, I could not get to sleep because a poem was insisting on being written, so I kept getting up to write the lines down as they came through.  I looked at it this morning and it made deep sense to me.

When desire is not enough,

when the train has left the station,

the expectant traveler stranded alone

on an empty platform and

the heart says, there is nothing

here for me now,

when there is no possibility of returning,

the desired destination unattainable,

then an unexpected stillness arrives

and opens its doors –

destination uncertain.

Choose to step on board

carrying your open, aching heart.

 

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

from Book of Hours, I 59

I wrote about Inanna having the gates opened for her to descend into the underworld in my last post.  My own journey through gates has been different, although I can identify with hers at times.  In earlier posts through this past year I have written about many different kinds of desire, and I am noticing a theme in my process.  The word that expresses this theme is CONNECTION.  Inanna was intimately in touch with life, but desired to connect with her sister – the unknown shadow to life, which is death.  My journey has been to dare to open my gates to life, others and the world.  Sometimes, there have been times of being thrust back behind them.  Sometimes an opening has been sudden and overwhelming, leading to a withdrawal, but I celebrate that I have persevered.

I think my desire for connection arose at my birth, due to an experience of separation, impossible to understand and integrate at the time, which I have written about elsewhere.¹  Perhaps the general human existential longing for connection begins with the birth experience.  I don’t know, but I think mine did.  Thinking deeply enough about this as a young woman made me passionate about not being separated from my babies when they were both born.  But there is another theme emerging alongside which relates to the desire for connection and ties into my earlier enquiries into fear – the desire to open the gates.  By this I mean the gates inside that defend me from the perceived threats of existence –  defend my vulnerability.  There can be no intimacy, no deep connection without vulnerability.  If any of the inner gates are closed, connection has been limited.  What I see in my own writing is this DESIRE TO OPEN, so that I can touch and be touched.

During the time of my enquiry into desire, I have been influenced by the Buddhist teacher, Rob Burbea.  I was attracted by his way of looking at desire as a positive, transformative force.  At the start of the Preface to his book on Emptiness, Rob maintains, “Curiosity and desire can be the most precious forces.”²   This strongly resonates with me.  I have attended retreats with him and listened to many of his on-line talks, and he keeps asking, “What is it you most deeply want?  What’s the most important thing?”  He also maintains that if you take the time to deeply reflect on this, once you get through the surface desires of the body and the habitual craving of the mind, you will discover that what you most deeply want is already available.  You just have to open to it.  This may sound simple, but it has been a long, challenging and, at times, devastating journey for me.

My gates have protected me when I felt intolerably vulnerable – but they became habits.  Habitual defences are difficult to detect, easier to see in another than in yourself.  If you don’t know they are there, the gates will stay closed.  Finding my way through my gates has been happening since I first felt the longing to connect as a small child.  A sad feeling of separateness is maybe the first clue I had of being closed off – what I am now seeing as being behind gates.  It was all a very instinctive, unconscious journey until, due to recurrent depression, I began looking at this feeling more directly in Encounter Groups during my late 20s.  Through the years I have explored many different approaches to opening my gates, so many I don’t want to list them all here.  It has required me to look at what is unknown and frightening – to risk being vulnerable.  In Inanna’s story, she finally understood complete, ultimate vulnerability – death.

In a few weeks I will be 70 and still, after all this time, my gates are needing to continue to be opened.  The instinct of the soul is to open – to be revealed, to make more and more contact.  Rob maintains that this is endlessly rich in its potential.  The survival instinct is to curl up and hide or run away from contact. That’s a very simplistic way of putting it – but it makes sense to me now.  There is the need to take care of myself – to take care of my vulnerability.  Threats can be real, I know.  But sometimes it is necessary to be vulnerable in the face of real threats – as Inanna was – as climate activists are.  There is no way to defend against the ultimate threat, anyway.  Our choices about this depend on what is really, deeply important to us.  That was why I asked what it was Inanna wanted – even though there is no one answer.  That is why I keep asking myself what it is I really want.  What do I deeply desire?

I want to open more and more.  I want to open my energy body – soften and blur my boundaries, without losing touch with that clear, empty axis within, grounded in earth and reaching up to sky.  I want to open my joints and the cells of my body.  I want to open all my senses, open my heart, open my mind.

I want to touch and be touched by everything, however vulnerable that makes me.  I want to feel connected to it all without losing my sense of being embodied.

Though this connection, I want to feel the uniqueness and beauty of each time, place, being and thing, big and small, gentle and terrible, in and around me, including my own beauty and uniqueness.  I want to open to the complexity of all of this without falling into overwhelm.

I want to be filled with love for it all.  And I want to express and create from this place – to share it and help others become aware of the precious potential of connection.

This is not too much to ask.

 

¹Booker, M (2015) Nothing Special, Experiencing Fear and Vulnerability in Daily Life; Axminster, England; Triarchy Press.

²Burbea, R (2014) Seeing That Frees, Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising; West Ogwell, Devon; Hermes Amãra Publications.

Very early on in my enquiry into desire – 3 years ago – I found myself drawn to the story of The Descent of Inanna to the Great Below, a Sumerian myth written down in cuneiform script on clay tablets about 4,000 years ago.  Sumer, as a distinct land and culture, was already 1,000 years old by then, having emerged over millennia in an area where agriculture began – what is now southern Iraq.    It was able to develop because these people discovered how to irrigate the land.  Although Sumer had two great rivers running through it, the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was basically desert-like.  For drinking water, people relied on deep wells.  Once they understood how to irrigate their fields, increasing the yield of their crops, cities were eventually able to develop and, with them, an elaborate and highly sophisticated culture, including art, music and literature.  It is this culture that is so beautifully evidenced in the clay tablets.  For my understanding of this story I drew on two translations: SN Kramer’s and the University of Oxford’s Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, both of which you can read for yourself.

But the first stirrings happened when, in the autumn of 2016, I was asked in a poetry class to try to write from the point of view of a mythological character.  Ereshkigal popped immediately into my mind, despite my not having thought of this myth for many years.  The poem (see below) came out as a whole in a 10 minute writing exercise and has not needed to be changed or developed since.  This rarely happens for me.  As I reflected on Ereshkigal’s words, I wondered, “What desire led Inanna into attempting to do such a deadly dangerous thing?”  Inanna was the Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Great Above.  In cosmology she was the morning and the evening star, shining and beautiful.  She was dynamic, passionate and overtly sexual – desire itself.  She was also the goddess of war, fierce in the defense of her people.    At the time Inanna decided to take this journey, she was no longer a young goddess.  She was in the fullness of her power.  Her consort was Dumuzi, the great Shepherd-God, King of Uruk, Inanna’s special city.  She had two grown sons, both of whom were kings in other cities.   She had the love of her people and many temples devoted to her.

The Descent is clearly a myth of the cycles of nature, of the connection between birth and death, reflected in the processes of sowing, growing and harvesting grain.  But, like all great stories, it comes across as more complex than that, with many possible layers of meaning.  It is a shamanic journey, where wisdom is brought back from the underworld at great cost.  It has been given the full Jungian treatment as a story of psychological transformation.¹   I, myself, have used it to help a therapy client make sense of her depression.  On yet another level the story can be seen as a family drama.  Sumerian mythology has a family structure and the characters are all enmeshed in close relationships.  Ereshkigal was described as Inanna’s sister.  Enki, who as the God of Wisdom and of the Deep, Sweet Waters is a key element in the outcome of the story, was their maternal grandfather.  Nanna was Inanna’s father and Enlil was her paternal grandfather.  Inanna’s close servant, advisor, companion and friend was Ninshubur, who was a Queen from the East in her own right.  My interest was in looking at the story from the perspective of desire – What did Inanna feel she wanted?  It must have been a deep desire for her to take such a huge risk.  Did she know what it was she wanted? – or was there just a deep “wanting”?

At the beginning of the story, Inanna “opened her ear to the Great Below.  She set her mind on the Great Below”.  Samuel Noah Kramer, who was one of the translators of the tablets, tells us that the word for “ear” and for “wisdom” are the same in Sumerian, and that it can also mean “mind”.  And he says that the word translated as “opened” can mean “set”.  Inanna specifically placed (set) her mind (ear) on the Great Below.²  What motivated her to do this and what she felt about it are not told, although, given the choice of words, the desire for wisdom or knowing seems to have been part of it.  She just determined to go.  The story also speaks in terms of abandonment.  She abandoned her people and her temples.  She abandoned the Great Above.  She left everything behind her to make this journey.

She prepared by taking to herself the seven “me”, her divine powers, in the form of the garments she wore.  Then she called for Ninshubur and together they made their way to the Gates of the Underworld.  There, Inanna told Ninshubur she needed her to wait outside the gates for her return.  If she didn’t come out in three days, Ninshubur was to take on all the attributes and garments of mourning and go to Inanna’s powerful grandfather, Enlil, and ask him to intervene.  If he refused, then she was to go to Nanna, Inanna’s father, for help.  If this proved fruitless as well, then she must go to Enki, because “He knows the secrets” and would know what to do.

Then Inanna knocked loudly on the gates, which were guarded by the gatekeeper, Neti.  He didn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily want to come in and asked her, “Why has your heart led you on the road from which no traveller returns?”  Inanna announced it was because of her sister, Ereshkigal – and because she wanted to witness the funeral rites of her sister’s husband, The Bull of Heaven.  This last seems spurious to me and is never mentioned again, but the first rings true – she wanted to see her sister.  But why, and why now?  Here may lie the family drama.  Whatever the reason, Ereshkigal was not pleased when Neti brought her the news that her sister was outside the gate, demanding entrance.  Basically, she was being put into the position of having to commit sororicide.  She told Neti that he was to allow Inanna through the gates, all seven of them, but he must only lift each gate a little, so that she must crouch down in order to enter – and he was to remove one of her garments at each gate, thus divesting her of her divine powers.  The first time this happened, Inanna was indignant – but Neti firmly told her that she was not to question the ways of the underworld.  It seems to me that it must have been at this point, before which Inanna was every inch the proud and powerful goddess, that she realised the journey would not be on her own terms.  By the time she reached Ereshkigal, Inanna was naked and on her knees.

INANNA

Unlike the burning passion

I know so well –

hot, sticky and raging –

this desire rose cool and sharp

from deep inside me –

to see her, to touch her and know.

It would not let me rest.

 

I knew it would be risky

to go to my sister’s house,

so I left explicit instructions

with the woman I trusted most.

Even if the others refused,

the old man by the water

would not let me down.

 

Pierced through by longing

to hear her dark secrets,

the deeper I went

the less of me there was.

And when I looked up

into her obsidian eyes.

I knew I would know.

 

ERESHKIGAL

She wanted to come –

my beautiful, sparkling sister –

to visit me.

From where she danced in the sky –

kissing the moon –

she could not see me,

so failed to understand.

As much as I loved her, she needed to know

she could not just drop in for a chat.

 

So I stripped her of all her pretty things.

She could have turned back,

but she always was game for a lark –

up for a dare.  Even as a child

she would lead the way –

lifting up latches of doors

we were not meant to enter –

peering into places

we were not meant to see.

 

Here, I am in charge and I know this place.

The mysteries of darkness and death

are in my care –

not for the curious.

When finally she arrived –

naked and expectant –

I pulled off her shining skin

and hung up her dripping body.

She needed to understand her limits.

Outside the gates, Ninshubur waited the allotted three days, and then carefully followed the instructions Inanna had given her.  Both Enlil and Nanna refused to intervene, maintaining that Inanna well understood that going to “the Dark City” was a one-way trip.  It is interesting that in both translations these gods describe Inanna as having “craved” the Great Below – they believed she desired something there.  Ninshubur had to place all her hopes onto Enki.

NINSHUBUR

I did not want her to go.

But when she told me to stand guard –

to hold vigil – I thought:

I am a woman.

I know how to wait.

 

Her father and grandfather

dared not come between

these two puissant sisters.

I saw fear in their eyes,

and felt rage and despair.

 

So to the deep, sweet water

I walked and sat down.

I tore at my hair, called out my grievance.

The old man received me with

kindness and tears – then set to work.

 

ENKI

I heard her pain and grief

long before word arrived –

my skin tightened –

my bones ached.

This dark, solemn sister,

so aware of necessity,

knew she had no choice.

 

I remember them both

in my heart’s mind.

My fingers remember

the touch of their hair –

one like a raven’s wing –

the other, liquid light.

Two hearts beating in time.

 

Long separated –

co-existence not an option –

it was only a matter of time

before the shining one,

so full of possibility,

would seek the other out.

I choose to heal them both.

Enki pulled a little bit of dirt from under a fingernail on one of his hands and fashioned it into a tiny being, with no gender, and he called it a Kugara.  Then he pulled a little bit of dirt from under a fingernail on his other hand and fashioned it into another tiny being, with no gender, and he called it a Galatura.  To the Kugara he gave the Water of Life and to the Galatura he gave the Food of Life.  He told them to swiftly go down to the Gates of the Underworld and squeeze under them.  He said they would not be noticed because they were too small and they had no gender.  When they came into the presence of Ereshkigal, they would find her in great pain and unattended.  When she cried out, they must cry out too.  When she groaned, they were to groan with her.  When she moaned, they must moan too.  Then she would notice them, and she would be grateful that her pain had been witnessed and shared.  She would offer them a reward – anything they liked from all the riches of the world.  But they were to refuse anything she offered, and ask only for the body up on the hook – and she would give it to them.

KUGARA AND GALATURA

We are Enki’s emissaries.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

Like flies we flit to and through the dark gates.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

It’s life we carry – and the old man’s love.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

She’s alone and unaided – we come to her side.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

We hear her cry out – we hear her groan.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

We hear her pain – take her pain as our own.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

She is birthing in death and dying in birth.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

We echo her cries and offer our tears.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

She’s no longer alone – no longer unheard.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

She blesses our presence, gives us the dead.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

Both queens are restored by the water of life.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

Revived to themselves, healed of their strife.

We are not much – a pinch of dirt each.

 

The smallest of gestures can cross deep divides.

It need not be much – a glance or a word.

I’m here and I see you – I’m touched by your pain.

Empathy’s emissaries.

And so Inanna was restored to life by the intercession of Enki’s tiny beings, and she began her journey back to the Great Above.  I want to leave the story there.  What comes next is rich and interesting, but it doesn’t shed any more light on what desire drew Inanna to make the descent in the first place.  I told this story, including reciting the poems, to an audience at Wootton Fitzpaine parish hall.  It was well received and, afterwards, I asked them what deep desire they thought led Inanna to go on such a dangerous journey.  Some answers were along the family drama line, the sister-thing; some along the more shamanic line and many along the line of the need to bring together the opposites of light and dark, life and death.  A child in the audience said she thought Inanna had become dissatisfied with having everything she wanted, and desired to know what it was like to have nothing.  Of course, all of these answers are valid.  Here are my thoughts:

The child is right.  Inanna was filled to the brim with the delights of heaven and earth.  It was what she knew and she felt confident and powerful there.  But she did not know death.  She was aware of death, but had no deep knowledge of it.  She must have sensed the power of it – something she could not get at – could not understand.  This left her with a sense of absence, of lack, and therefore of longing.  The desire for the underworld is about what you want and don’t know, not about what you know and want.  It involves that intense sense of wanting to penetrate something you feel is there somewhere, just out of sight, just out of reach.  It requires going deeply inwards, into the dark.

There are times in life when death reaches out and touches you.  Then the need, the desire even, wells up inside to understand what it really means.  From childhood onwards, it has come up many times in my life – death’s existential mystery.  Sometimes it has been just a soft brushing past and sometimes it has been a hard blow.  Since the death of my parents and then of several friends, mostly younger than me, combined with the undeniable aging of my own body, my awareness of the nearness and elusiveness of death appears on an almost daily basis.

I am beginning to see that my explorations into fear, creativity and vulnerability all have been, to some extent, a response to this call from the Great Below.  But I have also been passionately listening to the call of the Great Above.  I hear it in the song and flight of birds, see it in the soft look in another’s eyes, feel it in the shock of moorland or sea air in my lungs.  Desire is about life and, for me, about wanting to feel fully alive.  I don’t think Inanna wanted to lose her life.  It’s more like she wanted to add death to her life.  I think my bringing together of fear, creativity, vulnerability and desire have been further enabling me to “open the gates” – and these gates have levels of meaning, just like the story of Inanna has.  My deep desires are around feeling fully connected to my place in being.  This includes both death and life.

¹Perera, S.B. (1881) Descent to the Goddess, A Way of Initiation for Women; Toronto, Canada; Inner City Books.

²Wolkstein, D & Kramer, S N (1983) Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer; New York, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Sand Francisco, London, Mexico City, Sãn Paulo, Sydney; Harper & Row Pub.

The journey is a much used metaphor for the trajectory of life – as well as for the different phases, aspects or particular experiences of life.  It is a metaphor with mythic potential: the journey of the sun and of the moon in the sky, of migrations both human and animal, Homer’s Odyssey, the Saga of Eric the Viking, the Crusades, Eros and Psyche, the shamanic journey, etc.  Journeys appear over and over again in fairy tales: East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the Snow Queen, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Musicians of Bremen, to name a few.  But the journey metaphor also has a deeply personal potential: the journey of one’s life as a whole, a journey of the heart, a journey of adolescent discovery, an educational journey like through university or a professional training, the journey of parenthood, an actual journey to a particular place or places and the way this impacts your life, a spiritual journey, and so on.

Journeys imply time, place and change.  You are not the same at the end of a journey as you were at the start.  I suggest that behind every journey in life or in story, lies desire.  There is something that one wants, hopes for, desires that motivates the action and direction of a journey – the more important the journey is, the deeper the underlying desire.  The deep desire motivating the journey may not always be known or understood by the journeyer.  It may lie beneath many layers of desire that feed the journey.

I am going to share here a particular journey I took in my early 20s – my emigration to Britain, where I have remained ever since. Initially I just wanted to separate from my life as it was in the US.  I wanted to separate from my family, from my former lover and from what I saw as the excessive consumerism and superficiality of Californian life – to have a new beginning.  I had spent a summer travelling around the UK, mostly hitch-hiking, just before my last year at university, and it had given me a sense of freedom, excitement and adventure that charmed me.  I had a sexual encounter that summer, that awoke a deeper physical passion in me than I had so far known, and I felt I wanted more of this. This desire for freedom was, I believed, what mainly drove my decision to undertake my journey.  Of course, as we know, life is not so simple.  I met many challenges, difficulties, and emotional heartaches within a short space of time after my arrival.  I was not free after all, as I had to earn a living, work out relationships, and make important decisions about creating new circumstances in my life.  It was hard.  But I still wanted to stay in Britain.  Why?  I didn’t really know at the time, but at every point where I could have returned to the US, I felt compelled to remain where I was.

After many years, what I have uncovered is my desire to be close to my mother – and to “mother” in terms of the earth that I feel I come from.  This makes my journey seem counter-intuitive, as my mother was American and I left her to undertake it.  But, a bit of family history might help reveal an understanding.  My father was English, and my mother was American.  She fell in love with him in the late 1930s, when she met him in Washington DC where he was a visiting scientist at the Carnegie Institution.  Against the wishes of her father, she married him and headed for England, just as the clouds of war were gathering.  He was returning to undertake the development of radar, which became a hugely important defensive tool during the war.  My mother moved with him from Cambridge, to Swanage and then to Malvern, following the radar research as it moved to avoid enemy detection.  I now understand the psychological romance of wartime existence that affected so many of her generation in Britain, but as a child what I felt was her deep connection with that place and time.  She was in love, during an intense time, in a new place, bonding with others in the same boat.  It remained a part of her own journey that had a kind of mythic aura about it.  When she talked about it, I could feel her sense of connection.  And that kind of connection was something I felt deeply lacking in myself.  So, without consciously realising it, I tried (mistakenly) to reproduce that experience of connection she had found.  What I really wanted was to connect with her – and to find, through that, connection to place, to body, to life.

I did eventually begin to find my own means of connection – but that was another journey, not the journey of migration I made in my 20s.  It took 40 years for me to really deeply connect with this place on earth and with my own body.  Through this connection there is a growing sense of a deeper and ever present connection, which I now experience as having been there and available all along – waiting to be recognised.

 

 

 

 

A strong human desire that is expressed, as far as I can see, in all places and at all times of our history, is the desire for freedom.  That is not to say that everyone prioritises this desire.  Some people place their desire for safety and security before their desire for freedom.  But is this just prioritising the “freedom from” (hunger, uncertainty, pain, fear etc.) over the “freedom to” (move, express themselves, explore, question, develop etc.)?  And then, of course, there is the desire for freedom from desire, as in the Buddhist sense.

When I ponder deeply about the desire for freedom, I go down into my body and feel into a sense of not being free.  It feels immediately tight – constricted.  If I go with this further into the place of oppression, the images are of being bound, closed in, behind a barrier that I can see through but cannot open and go out – no access to the unlimited possibilities of being alive.  A feeling of anger arises at being unfree.  This is an anger that can lead to violence, revolt and war.  It feels powerfully energetic.  I want to burst the chains that bind, break open the gates – and push aside, even hurt, anyone that I feel is linked to my oppression or might try to block my movement to freedom.

When oppression is there – one person or group denying the freedom of another person or group – something needs to change.  How to bring about that change for all those involved – maximise both the freedom from and the freedom to – is a complex social issue that is essential to continue to address.  But it is not what I want to explore here.  I am more interested in inner freedom and, if you like, self-oppression.  The desire is the same, but the solutions are, perhaps, particular to the individual.

I think, for me, the desire for freedom is a deep desire.  It resonates through my body and my heart.  I recognise the feeling of constriction from my meditation practice – and I know that it is a sign of what in Buddhism is called “craving”, something I have already written about in my post “Desire arises from contact – a Buddhist perspective”.  Craving is a particular kind of desire to grasp at, cling to or push away whatever is seen as desirable or undesirable contact.  It is associated with the sense that things are not as they should be, a feeling of dissatisfaction, that in Buddhism is called dukkha.  How to free oneself from this craving is one of the main thrusts of Buddhist teachings.

I have learned, from Buddhist meditation practices and from Qigong, a way of following my desire for freedom that is not about engaging with the constriction through anger and effort.  Both anger and effort bring even more sense of constriction.  Freedom, instead, comes through relaxing more and opening more – becoming more soft and vulnerable, but without collapsing.

Initially, this feels counter-intuitive.  For instance, fear triggers the desire to escape what is seen as frightening and find safety.  In a survival situation, this is essential.  But, if it is not a real, here-and-now survival situation, the desire to escape becomes craving.  The mind and body feel constricted – insisting that you escape in whatever way you have learned to in your life.  I withdraw behind my inner gates and become, by so doing, less free.   I may believe myself to be more free from the source of the fear – but my “freedom to” has been seriously compromised.

An interesting reflection I have had about my desire for freedom is that I don’t want to be free of everything.  I want to be free within a sense of also being held – contained.  There needs to be a balance of some kind.  I can feel more free to move, to create, to express myself, if I feel held.  I think this is just because I am a human being, and we humans always need to feel we are in some way connected to others, or at least another.  This takes me back to what I wrote in the post, Why do I want to be witnessed.  I desire a sense of inner and outer freedom and feel it most when I am also held in open, warm, relaxed connection.  I want both, so there is a need for balance.

Within Buddhism, attachment is seen as a cause of dukkha.  But, to my surprise, I found when I married my husband, 25 years after we first got together, that a sense of great freedom and release came from giving in to, acknowledging and opening to my real attachment to him!  Before we got married, there was always a sense that we could break free from each other, and committing to a marriage has, in that sense, made us less free.  But I feel more free.  Is this just more free from the danger of losing him?  I know that by becoming attached I open myself to the pain of eventually losing him through death, my own or his.  Is the balance in freedom a balance between freedom from and freedom to?

When I declared in my Longing is not desire post that I wanted “to touch and be touched by everything”, I knew that this required a degree of openness and vulnerability I had not yet allowed myself.  Was the statement an invitation?  Or is that way of thinking too reductionist and simplistic?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that, shortly following a fall in the middle of May this year, I experienced a mini-stroke that rendered me more open and vulnerable than perhaps I have ever been since I was an infant.  I had no energy to resist feeling this vulnerable – I had to just allow it.  My body literally shook for several days at frequent intervals, like a rabbit who has had a near miss with death.  I could do nothing – go nowhere.  At first I had difficulty thinking and speaking.  It was over a week before I could even begin to reflect on what had been happening.  I was open to every emotion in and around me and found myself often in tears.  At some point in this time, the new neighbours across the road had the beautiful tulip tree in their front garden cut down.  I howled in grief and then wanted to kill.  Thank goodness I had no magical weapon to hand.  The swifts did not return when they usually do and I cried whenever I thought of them (some have now come back).  My friend wisely told me to stop listening to the news, because it was upsetting me so.

But the really interesting thing in all this weakness, openness and vulnerability was the kindness and love that washed towards and through me from so many people.  Now, I passionately believe in caring (see Do you care?) and I have been more than able to care for others: friends, lovers, my children, my students and clients and the many creatures we share this world with; but I have had to work very hard to allow myself to be cared for or cared about.  Not an unusual story, I know.  It’s all about vulnerability.  You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable in order to deeply feel the caring of others.  My stroke rendered me deeply vulnerable and the care flooded in.  I hope I never stop crying about this.  Not only am I loved – but I have allowed myself to feel loved.  It took a stroke to get me there.  I wish it had not been so hard.  However, I am very lucky.  It was only a mini stroke, from which I will completely recover – not a full blown stroke.  And this huge lesson is the gift of it.

I’m exploring here my desire to be witnessed in movement practice and what seems to happen when I experience being witnessed.  I acknowledge that the developmental root of this desire is within the mother/child dyad – the need for the mother’s gaze.  If there is any sense of lack arising from this need, it can lead to a longing for “being seen” – a sense of want based on longing and lack.  I know this longing well, and it has affected my relationships with important others all my life.  But I have already said that I want to take desire beyond longing and lack.  I am curious – is my desire to be witnessed just about longing and lack? – or is it more than this?

It doesn’t feel like a longing – it feels like a desire.  Partly this is because I have increasingly given myself the opportunities to experience it.  There is a sense of the excitement – frisson – about being witnessed when I move.  I know it will be a different experience from when I am moving within a group without having a focused witness.  It is also different from moving within a public context where I am noticed and watched by others.  There is some similarity to when I am performing for an audience – certainly then there is a sense of intensification – but I don’t have to be performing to feel these effects.

Movement practice is not therapy.  It feels very different to me, even if there are therapeutic outcomes that can arise from it.  So, let me try to distinguish having the attention of a therapist from having the kind of attention I am talking about.

As a dramatherapist, I have developed some understanding of the effects of therapeutic witnessing.  There is, of course, the sense of holding, receiving and supporting, which relates to the developmental roots mentioned above.  It’s an important function of the therapist role – to give the client a healing experience of being seen – and this is on-going in both one-to-one and group therapy.  But, in a therapy group, I have noticed something more than this can arise.  What I have experienced when being actively witnessed in a therapeutic group setting (the focus of the group is on what I am expressing) is an intensification in what I am feeling and a heightened focus in what I am doing.  It suddenly feels more “real”.  I believe I become more connected to myself as well as to the context I am in.  I have talked about this in the past with my dramatherapy students, and they have reported a similar experience.

Witnessing, of the kind I desire, means giving agreed, gentle and curious attention from a kind of distance.  The witness has no particular desire to affect the actions of the person being witnessed.  They have no particular agenda for the other within their role – although, just by witnessing, they do affect them.

I had a lovely experience recently of being witnessed in a movement group.  The instructions to the witness were to allow and witness the other’s “complexity” as they moved. I felt the usual “frisson” and also an intensification of my awareness and focus.  But something more than this began to happen – I felt free.  And with this a kind of playful joy arose.  Was it my complexity being “allowed” that enabled this?  Was it the quality of the attention my witness gave me?  Was I just at that place in my own process where this could happen?  Or a complex mixture of all of these?

The context of a group seems a factor in what I experience – whether the witness is another in the group, or the group, itself, is witnessing.  Is this about having a social context? – about the primal group (family)?

 

 

 

 

It is possible to view, and to feel, desire as an expression of life force: the desire of each alive being to have its own life – the desire to grow, to express one’s being, and to procreate – the desire of life to create more life.  In early spring the desire for the return of the light arises strongly in me and others – for the return of the life that light brings.  When the light is returning, there is a huge energy for life seen and felt all around.

In my life I have experienced several bouts of lengthy depression – some deeper and longer than others.  In that place, desire disappears.  I have never arrived at the point of reaching a true desire for death, but I certainly know the lack of desire for anything at all.  There has always been something that keeps me going – but it never feels like desire.  Eventually, I have learned that depression does not last.  The last time it arose, I saw it and knew it quite quickly – and knew I just had to wait it out.  That was an awareness that took the darkness and fear out of depression – but not the lack of desire, energy, motivation and joy in life.

Over 30 years ago, in my Jungian readings, I came across the metaphor of a mythological journey of descent for depression – and saw that I could view it as my psyche needing time in the underworld.  I couldn’t follow it there – my body was left empty in the land of the living.  I had to wait for re-emergence, and the time needed has varied from a few weeks to many months.  But learning about, and resonating with, the mythological journey to the underworld or Earth’s seasonal cycles, is one thing.  It took more years and further descents for the realisation of this to become embodied and part of my deep knowing.  Discovering the metaphor was a seed of understanding, not the lived understanding itself, which required repeated journeys into depression.  These kinds of insights keep deepening with lived experience.

As shown in the poem below, there can be a kind of longing in depression – but it is not desire.

Turning

 

I have wanted to lie down in a muddy field –

to have rain dissolve my bones and my flesh –

to become earth again.

 

I have wanted my body to be carried by a river

out onto the sea –  shifted like driftwood –

above the deep wet.

 

I have wanted to stretch and thin out –

the wind to blow through me –  my cell walls to open

like wings to the air.

 

Fleeing like Daphne, this longing to shapeshift –

turn away from the fire – has never endured.

I return to desire.

Desire is everywhere.  I was recently presented with a number of items and invited to choose the one I desired – I went straight to a lemon.

Lemon Desires

 

This lemon wants to have my attention – and it does.

It wants me to break open its bright yellow skin.

As I do, my desire increases with its

only-possible-as-lemon scent.

Its desire meets and engages my desire.

We are in a mutual desire relationship.

 

This lemon wants its seed released

to germinate, to reach for the warmth,

then the light of the sun.

 

This lemon wants to express its treeness –

to root, branch, leaf and blossom –

to open its blossom, exude nectar and pollen –

to arouse the desire of bees.

The exotic, erotic blossom desires to pollenate

and be pollenated.

 

This lemon embraces the desire of

seed, tree and blossom to fruit –

and requires the whole cosmos

for its fulfilment.

I desire to be a willing participant

in this relationship of desire –

to see, to touch, to hold, to smell,

to break into, to taste –

too sour!