Recently in Spirituality Category

Independence Park I

I have been interested in becoming a psychotherapist since I was 20 and did volunteer work in a state mental hospital, but it took me until I was 51 to take concrete steps in that direction. Though something in me felt it was my calling, I avoided that path because I was not sure I could handle the impact of the emotions of 20 or 30 people a week. Carrying people's feelings with me has always been an issue, and it was only after sufficient difficulties had occurred in my own life that I felt I could handle whatever storms found their way into my therapist's office.

Even in my 50s, though, I have often found myself emotionally exhausted by the end of the week, and it has been a project of mine to find a way to stay balanced and centered in the midst of my work. Photography has helped, as has meditation, and so has processing my own responses. But I have felt that I was missing a critical ingredient. For years I have been using the image of the rocks by the seashore as a metaphor for how I want to be in a therapy session -- feeling the water wash over me, but not dislodged by the endless current. However, rocks are (as far as I know) inert, and so this metaphor never quite worked for me. Now, I think I've a metaphor that does what I need.

In a recent Focusing session (more on this later, but for a quick introduction to Focusing go to YouTube.com and search for "gendlin focusing"), I tried to find out what the part of me that grows tired when I do counseling needs. I found myself thinking of gyroscopes.

As a child, I was fascinated by these amazing devices, which can be pushed in any direction but, as long as they keep spinning, always right themselves. In the Focusing session, I found myself imaging a gyroscope made of light, a tiny spiral galaxy spinning inside my belly, supplying me both with energy and eternal balance. I soon realized that my own belly, though larger than I might like it to be, could never contain such an object, and so I called on an image of the big-bellied Buddhas one sees smiling in Chinatowns. I imagined my own belly to be of this more substantial size.

The image of the big-bellied Buddha with a spiral galaxy gyroscope spinning inside comes to me often during the day, and each time I recall it, it becomes more real, and more stabilizing. Now, more often than not, I am energized by the end of a work day, and I have this image to thank.

I think we can all use a Spiral Galaxy Buddha Belly Gyroscope, or something very much like it, to stabilize us as we go through life's ups and downs. We need to move in life's direction, but we need to find our way back to center, too.

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce a photo series I've been working on for the past couple of years, which has also been a steadying influence. One form of meditation I do is a morning walk, close to dawn, to Independence Park near my home. Independence Park is the first place north of Boston where the Declaration of Independence was read. I find the islands off the harbor (Great Misery, Little Misery, Baker's Island, and several more whose names I do not know) provide a peaceful setting for photographic studies of the sea, the sky, and the changes they reflect through time. Like my work with mandalas, creating these images, too, feels like a silent, deep communication with forces much larger than myself.

I hope you enjoy them, and I wish you well in your own pursuit of centering devices.

More anon,
- David
David J. Bookbinder, LMHC

Discussion:
Art, Healing, and Transformation group
Flower Mandalas Project group
Cultivating Creativity group

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© 2009, David J. Bookbinder

A little over a year ago, roughly coinciding with the 15th anniversary of my near-death experience, my good friend Larry "Doc" Pruyne completed a short film about me. It tells the story of my flower mandala images, my work as a psychotherapist, my personal journey of near-death survival, and the connections between them. As NDE anniversary number 16 approaches on February 21, 2009, I wanted to post his film here.

Larry knows my story better than anyone. He is the person who drove me home from the hospital that nearly killed me, and our friendship has been mellowing and deepening ever since. My life and his have intertwined in many ways during the past 16 years, and this film represents, in part, the product of that interweaving. It was a reluctant collaboration: Larry came into it with his own ideas of about how to tell the story, and of course so did I. The film mingles our two points of view not only about my story but also about art, healing, transformation, and storytelling itself. It is a snapshot both of the period during which it was shot and of our friendship. As we evolve, perhaps it will, too.

healing image is also the prototype for a series of films Larry is working on that that deal with art, artists, and the artistic process.

Contact:
Lawrence "Doc" Pruyne is a filmmaker and writer in the Boston area, with over 800 articles and stories published. His film healing image has been widely displayed for college audiences and at festivals, including a Best Short at the Somewhat North of Boston Film Festival. He can be reached at docpruyne1@verizon.net.

Discussion:
Art, Healing, and Transformation group
Flower Mandalas Project group
Cultivating Creativity group

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Images © 2005-2009, David J. Bookbinder
'healing image' film © 2008, Lawrence Pruyne

Spoon Chrysanthemum

I've become relatively inactive in Beliefnet this past few months, absorbed in the other aspects of my life, but I'd like to start the New Year with a report on my personal progress on working toward the "miracle question" and its way of envisioning change.

I'm probably a 7 on the progress in my inner life (where 1 is as far as I ever was from my personal miracle, and 10 is I am there every day). Progress this past year is largely due to taking another Focusing training and finding a Focusing partner, with whom I'm starting to explore, and hopefully to release, a part of myself that has been hidden since early childhood. This is the "little boy" side, the side with much of my creativity and joy, who 20 years ago I imagined to be contained in a titanium capsule six inches thick, but who now is a very real, if still timid, presense in my life.

On the counseling business side, I'm probably also a 7. I have finished up working at the community mental health clinic I'd been working at for 3 1/2 years and am now fully in private practice in Danvers, MA. Until September, the financial side of this was going surprisingly well -- I was getting perhaps a call a week from various sources, and most of them resulted in clients coming to work with me -- but this has dropped off since the financial crash, and I need to figure out ways to generate more referrals. I'm working on it.

On the art-making and art-marketing side, I'm probably a 6. I'm still working on finding a market for the flower mandalas (and am happy to hear suggestions / make connections through this forum), but I haven't created any new mandala work in a long time, nor have I made a lot of headway in finding someone to represent me. I'm continuing work on my Independence Park project (a study of the sea, the sky, and time) and am beginning to broaden the concept in ways I find myself thinking about when I'm doing other things -- always a good sign. And I'm starting to appreciate my growing skills as a photographer. I feel that a move to a new level is afoot, though where that will take me I don't know.

On the spiritual side, I have found a group of people and a teacher who, as I've written earlier here, is combining his study of the major world's religions into a practice that draws on several traditions in an integrated way. It seems well-adapted to our times and the migration of practices from west to east and east to west. I'm not 100% sure this is the way I want to go, so I'm also planning to reconnect with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanga of which I was briefly a member several years ago. Here, too, moving to a new level is afoot.

On the personal plain, where I've been about a 3 most of the past year, I'm now about a 7.5 and moving up the scale rather quickly, having found a partner quite different from prior partners. I feel seen and connected in a new way, and I find I'm also able to process, both within myself and with her, old baggage, and I'm starting to let it go. In part, this process is due to who each of us is, but it is also helped by my work as a counselor. I seem consistently to be taking insights from my personal work into my practice and vice-versa, so that each enriches the other.

Overall, I'd say I'm a 7, and on the threshhold of a major move up, as the various threads of myself and my life that I've been working on integrating since my near-death experience seem, finally, to be coming together. As Tom Petty said in "Learning to Fly," the future is wide open....

More anon,
- David

Discussion:
Art, Healing, and Transformation group
Flower Mandalas Project group
Cultivating Creativity group

Request the 15 Flower Mandalas screensaver: Fifteen Flower Mandalas

© 2009, David J. Bookbinder

Water Lily X

Discussion:
Art, Healing, and Transformation group
Flower Mandalas Project group
Cultivating Creativity group

Request the 15 Flower Mandalas screensaver: Fifteen Flower Mandalas

© 2008, David J. Bookbinder

Sun Wheel I mandala

In some ways my experience of the heart of Beliefnet has been tangential. Focused mainly on art and healing, I have paid less than full attention to the remarkable phenomonen of Beliefnet itself and it's intermixing of so many spiritual paths.

No more!

This is a little story of where I've been and where I think I'm going, spiritually. I'd be grateful to hear from others about their own journeys.

Although I was raised Jewish, I have not been active in that faith since my Bar Mitzvah. Growing up Jewish in a mostly non-Jewish community, where Judaism was largely ignored and sometimes scorned, led me to becoming an alienated Jew who, at an early age, wished he could be something else. (My mother once told me that I came home from Kindergarten one December day and declared, "I'm not Jewish, I'm Christmas!) It must have been cushing to see, as the years passed, that I couln't be "Christmas" no matter how hard I tried.

So, if I couldn't be "Christmas," and Judaism did not satisfy me, I needed to become something else. But the only religions I was exposed to in my home town near Buffalo, NY, were Judaism and Christianity. Unable to find my way into either, in my teenage years I drifted into agnosticism and what I see, in retrospect, as a sense of spiritual isolation.

That began to change in college, where I was exposed to the radical inversion of Judeo-Christianity in William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," a poem which began my lifelong quest for a spiritual practice and a spiritual home. I soon found Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism; learned Transcendental Meditation; sought draft counseling from the Quakers and briefly attended their meetings; visited Unitarian churches; and attempted to find some personal connection to communities that practiced in these traditions. Yet, nothing seemed quite right, and by my early 20s my spiritual quest had reached what felt like a dead end. I retreated, again, to a vaguely spiritual kind of agnosticism. And, again, to a sense of spiritual isolation.

My near-death experience at 41 put me back on a spiritual quest, and with much more urgency. I found that the "me" I was before my brush with death was not quite the "me" I was afterward. It's hard to summarize the changes. Some of them were transitory. For the first several months, I felt possessed of a powerful energy I had never experienced before. I knew who was calling when the phone rang, and letters with infrequent correspondents crossed in the mail. I felt as if I literally had a power I could direct with my hands, like bolts of electricity issuing forth from my palms and fingers. As I became increasingly involved in the activities of daily life, however, this psychic sense gradually faded.

Other changes seem to have become a permanent part of my character. One, common to almost all near-death experiencers I have met, is that I no longer fear death itself. Although mine wasn't one of the blissful near-death experiences I have since read about, neither was it at all frightening; it was, rather, by far the calmest moment of my life, deeply centering. I also returned with a sense of purpose, of living on borrowed time that I had better make the most of. Just prior to blacking out, I had seen a series of line charts in my mind, each one representing how close to my true path I had been in all the major areas of my life. At the moment of blacking out, I saw on each of these charts a break, followed by an upward trend moving into the future. I was flooded with a sense that I knew what to do with my life, at last, and hoped for a chance to complete it.

The path I envisioned 15 years ago has been much more complex than I imagined it to be in that moment, and much more difficult, but it has led me to re-discovering myself as a photographer and thinking of myself as an artist; to redirecting my vocation to healing; and to actively searching for a spiritual practice and community. I have been on retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh, have attended weekly Unitarian services, have revisited Judaism in various forms, have received a Sufi name and practiced Wazifas, and have studied the works of several teachers of various other branches of the world's religions. Yet I have not been able to find one place that feels like home. Always there is a foreign part I can't relate to, much like the Hebrew I listened to, uncomprehendingly, on Saturday mornings as a child. Or there is a sense of not-quite-fitting, of being the ugly duckling.

Until now.

Recently, my psychotherapy mentor, a man who for 45 years has been studying most of the world's great religions, has begun to integrate teachings from all these wise traditions into a single forum. He has created a spiritual teaching center where any and all of the spiritual teachings of humanity can find a home. This feels right, to me. Although it goes against the oft-repeated notion that "the man who chases two rabbits catches none" -- the idea that one must, as I was recently told by a Lama from California, choose one path and one teacher -- I feel a kinship with this group of spiritual seekers unlike anything I have felt before. There are, I have felt for decades, many paths up the mountain, but it is the same mountain.

This is, to me, the beginning stage of a true spiritual integration.

I believe that the spiritual landscape is changing, much as the racial landscape has changed, perhaps forever, with the election of a mixed-race President. For many years, there has been a global interchange of religions and spiritual traditions. The West has been flooded with the influences and traditions of the East, as in the prior several centuries the West brought (and sometimes forced) it's traditions on the East. Meditation and Yoga, for instance, have become part of our mainstream, and with these practices came many of the teachings that accompanied them. Through modern media -- radio, television, and now especially the Internet -- we have all, everywhere, the opportunity to be exposed to the accumulated wisdom of humankind. We are not limited to the traditions in our neighborhood or village, or of our forefathers. We live in the Global Village that Marshall McLuhan predicted in the early 60s, and we can learn from all of its teachers, everywhere.

Beliefnet, it now occurs to me, is a big part of this intermixing, a place within the Global Village where not only can anyone find a spiritual home, but also where we can visit all the other neighborhoods and, in so doing, achieve spiritual enrichment unattainable until the present moment.

So. That's where I'm at in my spiritual quest. I'll keep you posted on future developments and, I hope, you'll do the same.

More anon,
David

Discussion:
Spiritual Questing, Near-Death Experiences, and the Global Village
Art, Healing, and Transformation group
Flower Mandalas Project group
Cultivating Creativity group

Request the 15 Flower Mandalas screensaver: Fifteen Flower Mandalas

© 2008, David J. Bookbinder

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