Flower Mandalas

NOTE: This is the first draft of the “Mistakes” essay in my forthcoming book, Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas.
Responses and comments welcome, no matter how brief.

Mistakes: Alchemy
Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder

Many of my older clients are disturbed by what they see as lost opportunities, wrong choices, wasted years. Even my younger clients, some only in their mid-twenties, often compare themselves to their peers and find their own lives wanting – they’ve missed the boat, time and opportunity have gone on without them, they will never catch up.

As these troubled men and women describe the mistakes they have made, they turn their faces downward, their eyes sometimes glistening with tears, tones of anguish or bitterness in their voices. What emanates from them is shame and regret.

They may have rationalized that “Everything happens for a reason,” but they only half believe it; what possible good has come from these errant decisions, these preventable losses? Or perhaps their friends and families have attempted to console them by explaining, “you didn’t know what you didn’t know.” But this truism seldom provides relief because they can often retort, “But I did know! I knew it was a mistake and I did it anyway!”

I, too, have a catalog of such mistakes: Relationships that I knew early on could not work but held onto anyway, hoping against hope. More than a decade of toiling away as a tech writer when I knew I should have been writing something else. Disastrous financial errors anyone with common sense would have avoided. Medical decisions that nearly got me killed. The list is long.

I understand my clients’ feelings of shame and regret and the anger they direct at themselves. But in recent years I have also, mostly, moved past these emotions. I have found that mistakes, while I may wish I had never made them, have redeeming qualities and (as a former girlfriend once said about me and my redeeming qualities), they are redeeming.

When I talk to clients about their regrets and their shame, I encourage them to avoid the trap of victimhood, to see obstacles, even those they have themselves created, as challenges. Mistakes become, in the words of another old friend, “just another AFGO.” Introducing this acronym (Another F***ing Growth Opportunity) generally gets a laugh, but it also articulates a mix of resentment and humor that helps reorient us to the positive change that can emerge from negative experiences – even from our mistakes.

I’m fortunate in having been guided to a profession where my personal mistakes are often redeemed not only by learning from them, but also by being able to pass on to others what I have gleaned. When it is clear that one of my mistakes echoes a client’s, I may talk about what I’ve done, what I have lost, and what I eventually gained. “Maybe I can save you 20 or 30 years,” I might add.

I talk about the errors in my relationships that now enable me, often, to help refocus a marriage that might have gone awry, or to end one that may have lingered for years in a barely tolerable state. I recount the “dead-end” career paths I’ve been on, and how an unanticipated benefit of drifting has been to understand firsthand the many contexts my clients work in. When it seems appropriate, I also describe the financial and medical errors that led to my becoming a healer and that also force me to keep on healing even as friends my age consider retiring.

I also speak in more general terms about the Hero’s Journey, the carrot-on-a-stick inducement my own therapist held in front of me in the dark times. I explain how the protagonists in nearly every hero story are beset by bad decisions, but that only through making those mistakes – and learning from them – can they traverse the path between not-quite-a-hero and truly heroic; their mistakes are a necessary part of the journey. This arc is succinctly illustrated in the movie Groundhog Day, in which the weather man protagonist, played by Bill Murray, literally makes the same mistakes over and over, trapping him in a single 24-hour period, until he starts to experiments, to learn, to grow as a person, and is finally set free.

Each time I am able to aid someone through insights I would not have had if I’d sidestepped my mistakes, the errors of judgment become less like pain and more like small sacrifices I unwittingly made so I could help someone else. This process is alchemical, turning the lead in my life into gold so that I can give it away.

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Text and images © 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
davidbookbinder.com

I’ve “published” the 39 chapters of Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas that I’ve created so far on Wattpad.com. Wattpad lets you read through the book like … a book! As always, comments welcome. Here’s what I have so far:

http://www.wattpad.com/story/5697085-fifty-two-flower-mandalas

More anon,

David

NOTE: This is the first draft of the “Miracles” essay in my forthcoming book, Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas.
Responses and comments welcome, no matter how brief.

Miracles: Yellow brick roads
Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder

I am a miracle worker by trade. Or more precisely, a facilitator of miracles.

I make this claim sans grandiosity. My miracle-making abilities are as ordinary as those of the Wizard of Oz, an old man behind a curtain whose only real power was to trick Dorothy, the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion into setting forth on a journey out of their self-limiting beliefs.

The best trick I’ve found to facilitate miracles is a deceptively simple question. (Sometimes I, too, need to be a little deceptive). I usually ask it early in my work with clients. It’s called the Miracle Question and it goes like this:

Imagine that after you finish reading this essay you go off and do whatever you do with the rest of your day. Tonight, you fall asleep. And while you’re snoozing, a strange thing takes place. The strange thing is that… a miracle occurs! The miracle is a special one, just for you. It’s that all your problems and concerns are solved: Poof! But, because this miracle happened while you were asleep, when you wake up tomorrow, although you are solidly in the world of the miracle, you are unaware of it. So the question is: Tomorrow morning, from the moment you wake up and as you step through your day, what do you notice – in yourself, in your surroundings, in other people – that eventually gets you thinking, “Something’s different about today. A miracle must have happened!”

You are looking for a shift in awareness that begins a journey, a realization like Dorothy’s after the tornado deposited her in Oz. She steps out of her house, looks around. As the film itself shifts into Technicolor, she sees the yellow brick road, the munchkins, the horse of many colors. After a while she turns to her little dog and exclaims, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!” You are looking for your I’m-not-in-Kansas-anymore moment. “Something is new and different, and I like it.”

After I ask clients the Miracle Question, I guide them through answering it, using prompts like:

How do you feel when you open your eyes? Are you in the same bedroom? The same house? With the same people? What’s different as you get ready for the day? What’s different as you walk through it, hour by hour? What do other people in your life notice about you that’s different? What do you notice about them?

The Miracle Question is part of Solution-Focused therapy, which is based on the belief that we have the means to solve our own problems. The question helps people to envision, while in a waking dream, what their lives can be when all their concerns have been addressed and current problems solved. Gradually, as they walk through their miracle day, a detailed vision of that different life emerges. Then it’s just a matter of working toward that miracle, one doable step at a time.

After clients have answered the Miracle Question, I ask them to reflect on what pieces of the miracle are already there, in whole or in part. Then I request that they evaluate their present lives on a scale of 1–10, where “1″ is how things were when they were as far away from the miracle world as they have ever been, and “10″ is they are living the miracle, 24/7. Most people readily come up with a number: “I’m a 3.” “A 5.5.” And so on. That number is where the journey begins. The miracle happens as they walk down their own yellow brick road.

Before they leave the session, clients come up with a task or experiment that they believe will move them closer to their miracle lives. The task is typically not one they would do anyway, nor is it so daunting that they won’t attempt it. Instead, it is something they want to do, even if there is some anxiety, and just doing it, regardless of how it turns out, raises their score. Most clients come up with two or three ideas, and selecting one takes little effort. They know. As a final check, I ask them to guesstimate how much doing the task will raise their score. Then their journey begins.

The following meeting, we look at what they did and how it went. Then it’s rinse, lather, and repeat until, step by step, week by week, they reach their miracle.

It is difficult to get somewhere if you don’t know your destination and have no way to verify whether you are on the right path. Answering the Miracle Question provides a visceral sense of the desired destination, which becomes a North Star they can refer to at any time. Scaling from 1-10 each session provides a means for discerning how far they have traveled and whether they are still on track.

The process is akin to the Call to Adventure that launches the Hero’s Journey, the meta-narrative that underlies most of our heroic tales. It impels us to enter new territory, where we take risks and endure struggles we might not otherwise have taken and endured, but which yield rewards that cannot be obtained any other way. Much as Dorothy discovered she always had a home, the Tin Woodsman found his compassion, the Scarecrow saw the results of his brilliant mind, and the Lion demonstrated his courage, by traversing our own yellow brick roads, we discover who we are meant to be.

Occasionally, a client objects to the word “miracle.” I back off and describe the process in less mystical terms. Yet at the same time, I am aware not only that their miracle is within their reach, but also that compared to the miracles that occur around and inside us an uncountable number of times each day, our personal miracles are relatively modest, and hence attainable. All of creation, after all, is already miraculous.

Perhaps today is when you begin a journey down your yellow brick road. What will you notice when you awaken tomorrow?

The future is wide open.

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Text and images © 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
davidbookbinder.com

NOTE: This is the first draft of the “Love” essay in my forthcoming book, Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas.
Responses and comments welcome, no matter how brief.

Love: Essentials
Copyright 2013 David J. Bookbinder

When I was 25, living in Manhattan and trying to jump start a career in writing and photography, I visited my parents and brothers in Buffalo two or three times a year. On those trips, I also saw my maternal grandmother, Bubby.

Although I spent more time as a child with my father’s mother, it was with Bubby that I felt a greater closeness, and because of that closeness it was painful to see how she had declined. By the time I moved to New York, she was legally blind, mostly deaf, and unable to manage on her own. She lived in a Jewish nursing home near the symphony, an institutional environment. I was always uneasy there.

On one visit, as I was leaving I noticed two of Bubby’s former neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Klein, sitting in folding chairs on the lawn. Mr. Klein had suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side of his body and had also frozen half his face, so his attempts to talk were unintelligible. Mrs. Klein, on the other hand, looked virtually unchanged since the last time I’d seen her, more than ten years before.

As she and I talked, I could see that Mrs. Klein was as fit and sharp as I remembered her. She asked how I was and what I was doing, and besides describing my hoped-for journalism career, I told her about my girlfriend, with whom I had lived, briefly, after college, and whom I had followed to New York. Our relationship was stormy and difficult but, I told Mrs. Klein, I loved her.

“Love?” Mrs. Klein said, gesturing toward her crippled husband sitting nearby. She looked directly at me. “Love is 50 years.”

In that moment my whole concept of love changed.

Right away I understood that for Mrs. Klein, after 50 years love wasn’t about sex or passion, or even conversation. It wasn’t about getting what we need from the other person, at least not in any way I could comprehend. It seemed, instead, to be about being more than willing to put aside ones own comfort for the sake of the other person, and to feel no resentment for what, from the outside, might appear to be a sacrifice. At that time, 50 years with one person seemed unfathomable – and yet there they were, together, and apparently content to be living in a place I found disturbing even to visit.

Shortly before a long romantic relationship ended not long ago, I was visiting an old friend from college, telling him how things had been going and how the end of this relationship seemed imminent. “You’ve had that problem your whole life, haven’t you, David?” he said.

“I guess I have,” I said.

He laughed. “So have I,” he said. “But with me, it’s been with the same woman.”

Unless I can somehow beat even the most exuberantly optimistic predictions for life expectancy, I will never come close to Mrs. Klein’s 50 years with one person. But I have long reflected on that conversation, and in the nearly four decades since then I have been moving to embracing what Mrs. Klein was trying to teach me. Perhaps, in another decade, I’ll even get there.

At 25, even after my moment with Mrs. Klein, I didn’t understand that love, true love, is not about finding a “soul mate,” which I’d be hard-pressed to believe is how the Kleins saw each other. Nor is it about shared interests, or gratifying mutual needs, or “chemistry,” or even trust and respect, though all of these may help a relationship prosper. Through a path much different than that taken by the Kleins, but which has led me to a similar place, I’ve come to see that love itself is about recognizing the essential humanity of the other being and responding to it with an open heart.

D. H. Lawrence wrote, in his poem “New Heaven and Earth,” about crossing over from a world “tainted with myself” into “a new world.” He writes that before he crossed over, “I was a lover. I kissed the woman I loved, and God of horror, I was kissing also myself. I was a father and begetter of children, and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.” Afterwards, when he reaches out in the night and touches his wife’s side, he experiences her not as an extension of himself, but as “she who is the other.” When we experience others as truly other, with their own needs, wants, and desires, we can begin the process of loving them, of responding with generosity to those needs, wants, and desires.

Love need not be requited, reciprocal, or even packaged with what we think of as the components of a loving relationship. In the surrealistic movie Adaptation, based on the novel The Orchid Thief, Nicholas Cage portrays twin brothers, Charles and Donald Kaufman. Toward the end of the movie, both brothers are pinned down in a swamp at gunpoint by the author of the novel, played by Meryl Streep, and her lover. In this scene, which the brothers believe may be their last, Charles tells Donald a secret he has been keeping since high school. He had witnessed Donald flirting with a girl. She seemed to be kind and sweet when she and his brother were together, but she mocked him to her friends as soon as he was out of earshot. Charles had kept what he’d seen to himself all these years, to avoid hurting his brother’s feelings.

“I heard them,” Donald says.

“How come you looked so happy?” Charles asks.

“I loved Sarah, Charles,” Donald says. “It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away.”

“She thought you were pathetic.”

“That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago,” Donald says.

Being a psychotherapist has helped me refine my understanding of love, both as an observer and a participant.

As an observer, I am sometimes able to help people overcome the historical baggage they carry from unskillful love and move in the directions the Kleins seem to have arrived at on their own.

As a participant, I am able to practice loving selflessly. Therapeutic love is about seeing and accepting the essential nature of someone, what pioneer psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard,” and then drawing it out, reflecting it back, holding it for safekeeping when the objects of that love can’t hold onto it themselves. It is the foundation of the best therapeutic relationships, a love that is seldom directly stated but that is necessary, I believe, for any truly healing relationship.

Like Donald’s love in Adaptation, selfless love asks for nothing in return, and it does not end when the beloved is gone. The love itself lives on.

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Text and images © 2013, David J. Bookbinder. All rights reserved.
Permission required for publication. Images available for licensing.
davidbookbinder.com