As an artist, I don’t do counseling, however I
do use the cards to explore ways to become emotionally, I could write
free, but what I really mean is richer, more diverse. I have certainly
experienced all the twenty-two emotions depicted in the cards and more,
however I have tended to "live" in only a handful. Recently, I
have combined using the cards with a technique called focusing,
pioneered by Gene Gendlin. The focusing institute is at
http://www.focusing.org/.
The essential aspect to focusing is bodily listening with,
what Mr. Gendlin calls the felt sense. It is a learned skill that I
believe every counselor could benefit from. Focusing practitioners in
Afghanistan began using a poem by Rumi, titled
“The Guest House”. The poem suggests that being human is like being
a guest house, and every morning there is a new arrival. In Afghan
tradition, guests are honored and treated with utmost hospitality,
whether liked or not. I decided to focus with the idea of welcoming
every “guest” that arrived. This led to the idea that that the faces on
the cards could be considered as guests, which led to the idea of the
self as a house of cards. Using the guest house metaphor, I imagined
various guests sitting at a round table, like King Arthur’s, so that no
“guest” would feel less important than any other. It soon became
apparent that I was listening to certain guests frequently, or that
certain guests had my ear, so to speak.
For example, if the guest Anxious had arrived, with all the feelings
associated with Worry and so forth, I would say hello, and invite the
guest to sit at the table. This “action” provided an immediate relief, a
realization that the feeling wasn’t me, it was a visitor who could come
and go. I began to wonder. Why is it that some guests seem like
permanent residents, and why is it that they have my ear. The metaphor,
guest house and table, made the exploration much easier. I soon noticed
that Worry for example, always sat with a coterie of associates. Worry
sat with Doubt, who sat next to a guest I refer to as the Judge. They
all worked together to create a dark ambience in the “room”. I can’t say
how helpful it was to see them as guests, and gain some perspective, and
then work at deconstructing the beliefs that generated the stressful
emotions.
Using the cards with the technique of
focusing, it is a process of identifying an emotion, inviting the
emotion to sit at the table, and allowing a felt sense to form. The felt
sense has two aspects. The body feels “all that” about a particular
guest, and at some point the sensing begins of what it might mean. I
believe it is the mind at work with the body to clarify and make
conscious what the beliefs and perceptions were that created the
emotion. Each clarification leads to a new round, and step by step, an
ongoing process moving forward is created.
It’s been an astonishing personal discovery yielding feelings of
gentleness, intuition, and creativity. For example, I am currently
teaching myself to transform “the judge” or what many call “the critic”.
We all know this harsh personality and how it feels to be “convicted” by
the judgments and/or sentencing. I soon became aware that when the judge
had my ear, the context was one of punishment. The judge has no other
meaningful context and so it became easy to disengage. A personality I
will call the considerer sort of emerged or arrived. The considerer
looks at a given situation from every possible angle, every possible
perspective, opening the door, so to speak, to intuition, inspiration,
and a host of related aspects. The context is entirely different. One
important difference is that the critic only deals with what has already
happened, and does so within a punitive context, and moreover, closes
the door on any dissenting opinion. The emotional turmoil this creates
sort of fills every thing up, leaving no room or space for any thing
different. When in considering mode, past, present and future are all
part of the picture. There is a patient curiosity that emerges, what I
call a gentle dwelling on, and the context is one of compassion, with a
built in impetus toward resolution. By definition, resolution is “seeing
difference between. Seeing differences requires that the mind be open to
as many perspectives as possible. The more perspectives, the more likely
a new perception will shift into view. In that sense, perspectives are
like lenses.
Because listening is so important to this process, I looked up
listening, and it has the aspect of listing, like a ship. It is the
direction one is leaning towards, the direction in which one’s ear is
bent. This idea led me to the notion of "seeing voices". Combining audio
with video, so to speak, opens a new perspective, where body and mind
have a much better opportunity for discovery.
As an artist, an oil painter, it is currently transforming my practice.
For example, I have the sense now that colors have voices. It is a
delightful discovery and one that sort of expands the palate, or perhaps
creates a larger context from which to work. It has made painting more
pleasurable. I am less inclined to impose my will on the painting and
more inclined to allow colors their own voicing.
The ideas expressed here are a beginning, I hope the reader takes
something of value from this sharing, and I look forward to expressing
new perspectives down the road.
Best,
John Beder
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