Successful Failure

Wednesday 02 May was a day I have waited for a long time: to see my name in print on the cover of my first book. Well, not actually my book. I wrote ‘How Love Works: A New Approach to Lasting Partnership’ with and for my friends and occasional mentors, the deeply wise relationship experts Jeff and Sue Allen.

Wandering through the burgeoning spring greenery of Hyde Park on my way to the launch event at The Columbia Hotel near Lancaster Gate, I felt so nervous about this milestone step into the public limelight that for a moment I wished my mum was there to hold my hand. I’d put on my best turquoise skirt and top outfit, washed behind my ears, scrubbed my nails, cleaned my teeth, fiddled endlessly with my hair, applied some slap and was ready to rumble. The moment I got my sweaty hands on a copy of the book hot off the press, I could not help but squeeze it lovingly to my chest.

The life of a writer can be lonely and littered with rejection. Big shots, I once heard someone say, are just little shots who keep on shooting. I have been shooting a lot over the years, squirreling away at my writing not for the money (although that is very welcome), but because my heart is myopic in its passion for expressing the inexpressible, for putting healing, spiritual experience into words that the rational mind can grasp.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I have often pondered, I would continue doing exactly the same work, albeit without the millstone of a mortgage around my neck. I really have no choice. Along with my five-year-old son bouncing on the bed trilling ‘It’s morning time!’ with unbearable enthusiasm, it is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

A few minutes before Sue and Jeff started their presentation, I took a call informing me that a certain Facebook ‘friend’ had pinched an article of mine reviewing a workshop, edited it as if I had written it about him and posted it on his website to promote his series of ‘spiritual’ workshops. He had even included my name as the author. ‘What?!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s piracy!’

Mmmmm, so this is what success means, I mused ruefully to myself. Along with the bright lights comes the shadowy side of human nature. As much as I like to big up spirituality (it saved my sanity, but that is the story of my next book), there are few things that leave a worse taste in my mouth than spiritual power-tripping born of desperation. Bleuch!

(Note to self: Nothing less than authenticity and transparency will do in the spotlight. Especially the sceptical spotlight. Keep your nose clean!)

That’s the thing about stepping up: you are visible, a target. But the launch went swimmingly. The crowd laughed as they recognised themselves in Sue and Jeff’s unique take on the minefield of marriage: How come the person you thought was ‘the one’ is now ‘the one’ you want to chuck crockery at? Did you know that falling in love is basically about two sets of subconscious neuroses realising they have found their perfect match? That your partner will reflect back to you every single place where you are broken in your mind? That no-one can save you from your pain – only you can do that? That your happiness is your responsibility alone? That in order to open your heart you need to go through all the reasons it closed down in the first place? Relationships aint no picnic, baby.

Sue and Jeff are remarkably transparent. Throughout the book they illustrate their theory by sharing their story of coming back from the brink of divorce, along with practical tips and client case notes gleaned from 17 years of helping others out of relationship heffalump traps. They’ve made all the mistakes so you don’t have to. And they still work through issues, oh yes they do. For committed relationships are about growing and evolving together, not putting your feet up and sipping Pina Coladas in the mythical land of ‘happy ever after’.

Afterwards I answered questions, signed a few books, got tipsy at the hotel bar and hugged friends who came to support me. In bed that night I could not stop grinning. Even the desperate pirate could not dent my joy. Life has moved up a gear, that is for sure. I am a published author now. I have some status. People think my work is good enough to pilfer.

It has taken me days to absorb the fact that the book is actually really good and that I have to take some credit for this. I just pray to God my ego keeps itself in its place. Funny, isn’t it, that after years of striving, when recognition comes and doors start opening, it is actually rather scary.

‘Sometimes,’ Jeff once winked at me, ‘it is easier to hold onto our problems than take the next step in our lives. Of course it is scary. You are evolving into something different.’

Success, I have concluded, is really all about ‘failing forward’. Or maybe failing upwards. And, of course, never giving up. ‘Just keep going,’ a friend advised me on the phone the other day. ‘Whatever you do, don’t look down!’

Sue and Jeff Allen: visionworksforlife.com

Buy the book at: http://visionworksforlife.com/2011/how-love-works/

Also available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+love+works+jeff+allen&x=0&y=0

Reasons Not to Believe in Reason

I love it when science decides that it has discovered something new. Something that us old hippies have known to be true all along. Except no-one took any of us seriously. Quite the opposite. ‘Voices of reason’ delight in poking fun at all things ‘woo woo.’

Meditation: ‘What do you want to do that for?’ Tree hugging: ‘Oh my God, you’ve turned into a fairy.’ Yoga: ‘Standing on your head and wrapping your legs around your neck? Purlease!’

The benefits of such beardy-weirdy pursuits have not only been scientifically verified, some are celebrity-endorsed cool. Do you remember the people who started up the legend that is Glastonbury Festival? A bunch of hippies in a field, that’s who.

Yep. Never, ever underestimate hippy power. Or, for that matter, tree hugging fairies. Science has measured the vibrations coming off trees and the calming effect they have on our physiology (see Blinded by Science by Matthew Silverstone). And mindfulness, by the way (which is, essentially, meditation) is the hot topic in psychotherapy right now.

A Laughing Matter

Back in the 60s, no-one took the American intellectual and writer Norman Cousins seriously either when he holed himself up in a hotel room with a stack of his favourite comedy movies and (along with unconventionally high doses of Vitamin C) laughed himself free of the crippling bone disease known as ankylosing spondylitis. Oh, how science laughed at Cousins – and then abruptly stopped when it discovered endorphins, the body’s natural stress and pain-busting biochemicals.

Last month, BBC2 screened a Horizon documentary on the extraordinary power of the subconscious mind, complete with dramatic music to herald the groundbreaking scientific revelations. ‘We like to think we are in control of everything we do, think and feel,’ said the voiceover, ‘but in fact, this is an illusion.’ The conscious, rational mind is but the tip of a large, metaphorical mental iceberg. It is the hidden depths of the submerged subconscious mind that runs our lives. ‘Most of the time,’ one of the scientists added, ‘we are on cruise control.’

Across the country, there must have been swathes of hypnotherapists like myself gurning at the screen, shouting: ‘Hey science, tell us something we don’t know!’ The Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung was hypothesising about the power of the subconscious mind a hundred years ago (with the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious in 1912). How come it took the white coats so long to catch up? Because there weren’t the machines available to measure it all, I suppose. The first rule of academic research, for those of you who don’t know, is that if something cannot be measured, then it does not exist.

Measuring Stick

Dogmatic materialist science thinks it is so darned clever. And in many ways it is. But there is a fundamental point here that the materialist mindset needs to understand: Not one of us is a rational creature. Not even rational scientists.

Phobias are a case in point. Science, with its obsessive measuring stick has ‘discovered’ a long list of different phobias. They’ve made up names for everything from spider (arachnophobia) to banana phobia.

Hypnotherapists don’t need such labels. Phobias, generally, have their roots in an early distressing experience that gets latched onto the phobic object. A client will show up for therapy utterly frustrated that no matter how much her rational mind tells her that the swimming pool is absolutely safe, she cannot approach it without shaking with fear. In trance, we will invariably come up against an old memory such as playing happily on the beach at the age of three and having seawater thrown in her face. The water stings her eyes, the little girl is sobbing but no-one comes to help or reassure her. In her distress, her subconscious mind concludes: ‘Water is really dangerous and frightening. Therefore I will never go near it again!’ Until that three year old is reassured, until the sting is taken out of the whole experience at a subconscious level, no amount of rationalising or will power will ever get her adult self into the water in a calm, relaxed state.

Heresy

The evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake, author of many popular science books including, currently, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, was not just laughed at when he first introduced his theories of morphogenetic fields (how self-organising systems exist in fields of memory or habit), he was witch hunted. In 1981 Sheldrake’s first book, A New Science of Life, was declared a ‘book for burning’ by the late Sir John Maddox in a stinging editorial in the scientific journal, Nature. Sheldrake was branded a heretic.

Sheldrake also researches telephone telepathy and the sense of being stared at. At a presentation he gave last November at Imperial College, London, he amused the audience with anecdotes about scientists who will reveal their telepathic experiences to him privately, but don’t dare do so in front of their own colleagues. It is simply taboo. After nearly all the scientists in one small department confidentially disclosed such experiences, he threw down the gauntlet: ‘Why don’t you come out to each other?’ he asked the group. ‘At the very least, you’ll have a lot more fun!’

Science, surely, is about finding the truth, is it not? No matter how outlandish it may first appear. No matter how irrational. No matter how paradigm shattering. Dogmatic materialists had better get a move on because the tables are already turning. ‘What took you so long?’ us old hippies will laugh at them. ‘Keep up!’

www.sheldrake.org

True Paradox

‘A hundred billion galaxies!’

The philosopher and world religion expert Tim Freke was hopping up and down excitably, hands gesticulating like an Italian, at the sheer wonder and mystery of this thing called life. Curled around him in easy chairs in the drawing room of the Abbey House, Glastonbury, a gathering of forty or so extraordinarily ordinary people were mostly grinning along with him. We had all signed up for one of his Mystery Experience weekends and this one was held over New Year, the one heralding in 2012.

‘Specks of dust! That is what we are in this infinite cosmos,’ he enthused. ‘Tiny blips. Yet each one of us is an amazing individual creation. We are the centre of our own universes. Each one of us matters. The paradox is that both perspectives are true. It is not a case of either/or. It is both/and.’

Both/and... I mused to myself. I wonder what the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically atheist would make of that?

I cannot be the only one who rolls my eyes and wants to bang my head against the nearest wall each time I hear otherwise brilliant minds (Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens et al) dismissing spirituality as irrational, woo woo nonsense; who groans in despair each time I hear otherwise fairly sane minds insisting that they know how the universe was created because they read it in a 2,000 year old book (written by God, so it must be true, so there). The whole idea that any of us have even the tiniest clue as to how this universe of a hundred billion galaxies works is absurd.

The thing is, the more science knows, the more it realises how little it knows. Atoms, apparently, comprise something like 99.9 per cent pure space. Everything we see in our material reality (including our own bodies), is not, it turns out, so material after all. Yet, as Madonna would concur, we still have to function within the material world. The chair I am sitting on is still a solid chair, even if it is almost all pure space. Both material and non-material reality exist, all at once.

The paradox of life is staring me right in the face here in Glastonbury. Set in the grounds of the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey itself, this early 19^th century mansion is part of a Christian diocese. The resident chaplain is good friends with Tim Freke – and Freke is the man whose books ‘The Jesus Mysteries’ and ‘Jesus and the Goddess’ (best-sellers on both sides of the pond) debunk the notion of Jesus as an historical figure. The Jesus story, says Freke and his co-author Peter Gandy, is based on a pagan myth, so those who take it literally are deluded. Yet the chaplain and the resident smiley housekeeper have both experienced Freke’s retreats for themselves. They are lovers of the mystery too. Well, this is Glastonbury.

During the weekend, we experiment with different partner exercises to take us into the mystery (a sense of oneness, a kind of falling in love with everyone and everything) that involve rather a lot of staring into other people’s eyes. This might sound excruciating, but for me it was exquisite. Seeing each other – and being seen – with the naked eye turns out to be deliciously addictive. Then I get it: we are both separate and not separate, all at once. Different expressions of the same... what is the word for it? Consciousness, I suppose. Freke calls it Big Love. Whatever it is, I start feeling a bliss that is utterly beyond words.

It is only the connection between us, says Lynne McTaggart in her latest book on the science of spirituality, ‘The Bond,’ that is actually real. Everything else comes and goes. Like trees, our bodies grow from seed, age, whither, die and rot back down into the earth (or turn into ashes) to be recycled into some other form of life. Just because a loved-one dies doesn’t mean you stop loving them. It is bonding that creates families and communities, not just our bodies and brains.

I couldn’t bear physics at school, but quantum physics is churning out so much extraordinary data, even my ears are pricking up: Particles can flip in and out of existence, the observer affects the observed, entangled particles remain attached across time and space. This new science has even stumped Professor Dawkins, who by his own admission, does not touch the subject because he does not understand it. ‘I know my limits,’ he says. But that is precisely the point. Unless you are a mystic it is nigh in impossible to get your head around quantum physics. Why? Because it is a mystery, stupid. Doh!

Life is one big paradox. Religious fundamentalists and dogmatic materialists are just going to have to give up their need to be right and get over it. But, dear Lord, on bended knee I beseech you: Please get them to hurry up, because my head is really starting to hurt.

http://www.timothyfreke.com/

The Shame About Shame

Yesterday, I was stunned. I am still stunned – and I’ll tell you why. Someone whom I consider to be intelligent, educated, wealthy, cultured, conscious, creative, compassionate, talented, beautiful and all-round successful, disclosed to a small group of friends – me included – that, compared to her siblings, she feels like a terrible failure. ‘Why,’ she bemoaned, ‘am I living in this house?’ (Elegant Victorian, sleek kitchen, long garden, overlooking a park in south London. Looked pretty damn gorgeous to me.) ‘When really I should be somewhere else. You know, like Chelsea.’

Gasp.

This was a failure?

Honey, I wanted to say. You wanna know about failure? I was bankrupt at 28, having chosen the wrong man to have a relationship and a business with. I lost everything and it took me years to recover, not just financially, but to build up a mere modicum of self-esteem. Since then, I have been so desperate for some outer approval of my worth, that when practicing as a hypnotherapist in Bristol, I was only ever as good as my last session. If it went well: great. If I felt we hadn’t made enough progress, then I felt like a fraud. Who did I think I was to be offering therapy? When one woman insisted on driving over two hours to see me for sessions that I thought were going at a snail’s pace, I couldn’t bear the pressure, so I discouraged her to continue. I honestly didn’t understand why she thought I was so good. One long-term client started going into spiritual bliss in the sessions. We both simply sat there silently, with closed eyes and big grins on our faces, feeling at one with life the universe, everyone and everything. I couldn’t believe I was being paid for doing my favourite thing in the world and, again, suggested she move on.

What a plonker I was to give that up.

As a writer, I cannot tell you how many times I have emailed feature proposals to newspapers and magazines with such an energy of desperation that I know the ‘Thanks but no thanks’ email is coming before the editor has even read it. (Desperation is always the most effective turn-off. Have you ever dated someone like that?) Or, mostly, no acknowledgment email at all. Then there are my journalist friends who keep telling me to stop putting this stuff on a blog: ‘It’s way too good for that,’ they say, ‘get it published for goodness sake.’

But I can’t. I’m too scared. I cannot bear another rejection. The other thing is, I know that once I do get the recognition I want, the sense of approval will be fleeting, for, as the business mentor JC Mac says: Once the ego gets what it wants, it doesn’t want it anymore. There will always be some aspect of my life that will be less than perfect, that my ‘inner critic’ will be chomping at the bit to have a go at me about. Somehow I don’t think it is a house in Chelsea that my friend needs to make her feel better. It is something far less tangible, something far kinder, wiser and loving than that.

The journey from NGE (not good enough) to self-love is a tough one. I haven’t posted on this blog since September for a start. Surely I could manage once a month, couldn’t I? I ‘should’ be writing 1,000 words a day on my own book but unless I am in a state of flow, I might as well just flog a dead horse. Or, to be more precise, flog myself. For that is, in fact, what I am doing. Going into super-achiever mode only makes me more exhausted than I already feel being a mum, night-nurse, cook, cleaner, writer, therapist, wife, friend and late night PA for my husband’s burgeoning workload. (Stick a broom up my backside, as they say, and I will sweep the floor at the same time.) Not that I don’t love my family, my home and my jobs. I do. Fervently. It is loving and valuing myself I struggle with.

According to the American shame and vulnerability researcher Dr Brene Brown, the three most important points about shame are (1) We all have it (2) No-one wants to talk about it and (3) The less you talk about it the more you have it. The antidote to shame, she says, is vulnerability, to allow yourself to be seen, every single wart and all. To say I love you first. To be true and risk rejection. To send the proposal and make the follow-up call. To learn to feel worthy of love, regardless. So here I am: a terrible, yet wonderful failure at life. A woman with a good heart and way too many expectations of herself, just having a go; showing up, doing my best and seeing what happens.

‘Oh sweetheart,’ my old psychotherapist – a wonderfully eccentric woman – once said to me. ‘I came out as a failure years ago. You might as well get used to it. My dear, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not really trying.’ And if you’re not laughing about them, you are going to be miserable. End of.

The outer approval I crave simply doesn’t fill the gaping hole of unworthiness within me. Only I can do that. Seriously, only I can. Then it will be easy to sell my work because I will value myself, I will just know it is more than good enough. And oh, how I will laugh at myself for ever believing otherwise.

Check out Brene Brown’s talk: The Power of Vulnerability

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

Serious Silliness

‘Nooooo! You can’t back out on me now,’ Karen wailed to me on the phone. ‘I’ve been sooo looking forward to this…’

I really didn’t feel up for this mums night out idea to a rollerdisco. ‘I even bought this 70s silver bomber jacket off Ebay for it,’ she blurted, welling up with tears. ‘Oh look, I’m sorry. I’m totally pre-menstrual. Let’s just leave it and go another time.’

‘Hey, I know how important this is,’ I reassured her. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’ No matter that I felt shattered, my roots desperately needed doing, my legs hadn’t been epilated in several months and I was feeling utterly unpresentable. I couldn’t disappoint her.

So, last Thursday, I peeled myself off my horizontal position on the sofa and set off. I couldn’t even run for the bus. When I did get on it, I promptly closed my eyes for a short snooze before snapping myself awake and hopping off at Vauxhall.

The look on Karen’s face cheered me up immediately. ‘No kids!’ we squealed in unison as we hugged hello. No responsibilities other than to have a really, really good time. I didn’t know how long I would last, but I was determined to give those rollerskates my best shot.

It was touch and go to start with. I could barely balance and my thighs were wobbly. Maybe it was Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Starting Something,’ pumping out of the sound system, or memories of that Gloria Gaynor ‘I Will Survive’ rollerdisco video, or even that: I love to love, but my baby just loves to dance 70s tune. Part of it was certainly gawping at expert young movers weave in and out of the crowd, pulling off tricks, spins and dance moves that delighted me. Or just the thrill of letting my body have fun rather than letting my stressed out thoughts steal the limelight. But my energy mysteriously returned and, soon enough, I was gliding along with the rest of them, letting out little yelps and woo-hoos, giggling at the wheels on Karen’s skates which lit up as she whizzed by in her silver jacket. ‘Way to go, girl!’ we screeched at each other. I even managed to get my lacy crocheted sleeve caught up in some rapper type dude’s bling jewelry, which he gallantly and expertly disentangled whilst skating effortlessly backwards on one foot, his bright white smile and diamond ear stud glinting in the disco lights.

The frissons of excitement I got from occasionally bumping into the muscled torsos of handsome young men (skating I can do, stopping is something I need to work on) were only tempered by the thought that I was probably old enough to be their mother. Back in my teens, I would have thought that a middle aged mother’s idea of a good time would be a nice sit down with a cup of tea, a Hob Nob and a Mills & Boon novel. Instead, there I was with people often depicted by the media (especially in the light of the recent riots) as dangerous hoodies. People I hardly ever usually interact with. But their gleeful prowess on the rollerdisco floor was awesome, the atmosphere so easy and light, I can honestly say I have not had so much fun in a long, long time.

Squeezing myself into a space on the packed back seat of the bus home, it occurred to me that I have been way too serious of late, what with all those family and work responsibilities. Sometimes the answer to dealing with the existential angst of life is not deep and meaningful. It is just plain silly.

When I was in the controversial mystic Osho’s ashram (now known as a ‘meditation resort’) in Pune, India, in the late 90s, I took part in a week long meditative process called ‘Born Again.’ It was just two hours per day: the first you regressed to childhood and ‘played’ with the other ‘kids’, the second hour, we sat still in silent meditation. All we had were mattresses, cushions and a few bits of material, but once our inhibitions were out of the way, we devised the most fabulous games that made us laugh so much, we could barely stand (rolling about was more fun anyway). ‘Playtime’ left me feeling so open and innocent (and knackered) that the hour of meditation afterwards was so sweet, it never seemed to last more than 15 minutes.

Osho used to liken the ‘spiritual journey’ to three phases: sheep, lion and child. Once you have thrown off your conditioning (sheep), have learned to live your truth no matter what others think (the lion’s roar), you then become as innocent and playful as a child. Life becomes a ‘leela’, a play – yet recently, it had felt more like a grind. If you find me succumbing to the disease of seriousness and self-importance again, please, I beg you, slap me around the face with a wet kipper. It will be for my own good. Thank you so much.

The Warmth of Riots

There are lots of reasons why I could be angry with the rioters who live in my neighbourhood.

I live in Camberwell, close to Coldharbour Lane, the Brixton end of which was one of the recent London looting locations. Over in Peckham, where I take my young son to soft-play and swimming, a bus was set on fire with people in it, the post office burned down and numerous shops wilfully damaged. Then there is Walworth Road on the way to Elephant and Castle, where friends of mine witnessed a gang of masked looters wielding all kinds of weaponry on their way to pillage yet another Argos store. All of these places are but a few bus stops away. For two days, shops, offices, libraries and leisure centres shut early in my neighbourhood and the local supermarket was boarded up. People with tense expressions walked briskly home, rushing into closing shops to top up their Oyster (travel) cards. Living close to Kings College Hospital A&E department means we are used to sirens. Over these few days, however, they were relentless.

The riots, in fact, did not surprise me at all.

No matter where you live in London, opulent wealth is always tantalisingly close. In a culture where we are trained to find our self-worth outside of our simple right to be valued exactly as we are – in achievement, success, designer labels and flash cars – it is easy for those stuck at the bottom of the food chain to feel dispossessed. If I was hungry, poor, homeless, unparented and unmentored; if my youth club had been closed down (as about a third of them have in Hackney where the rioting kicked off); if I, like the respected commentator and Hackney resident Darcus Howe’s grandson, had been pushed up against a wall by police and searched more times than I could remember, I might have got excited at the chance to get my own back too. You cannot inflict destructive violence on others’ property if you have not already suffered enough yourself to be rendered too numb to feel pretty much anything anymore.

The ‘twisted morality’ that these riots were born out of, does not belong solely to the looters. Shameless greed runs through society like words through a stick of Blackpool rock: MPs fiddling their expenses, police taking backhanders from employees of Rupert Murdoch (who, despite his huge wealth and influence, pays NO tax in this country) and the banking system itself, which has already cost the whole country so dearly. I don’t see any of them having their ‘benefits’ taken away. Their lawyers are paid far too much to let that happen.

The more I contemplate the riots, the more I am drawn back to indigenous African wisdom. ‘If the children are not initiated into the village,’ an old African proverb goes, ‘they will burn it down, just to feel its warmth.’

In the Dagara tribe of West Africa the elders perform a ‘hearing ritual’ whilst the child is still in the womb, to ascertain his or her purpose in life; why they are being born into the community and what they have to offer. From the very beginning, they are respected. They belong. They are held and nurtured through every stage of life.

In her book ‘Spiritual Alchemy’ Dr Christine Page recalls her visit to a small village in Belize, Central America, where the community spirit was strong, until hard drugs permeated the community and addicts started stealing from their neighbours and families to feed their habit. Punishment, the villagers told her, did not work, for without self-respect there was no-one ‘at home’ to be affected. (It is a researched fact, by the way, that our costly prison system does not work, except as a revolving door for the majority of offenders.) What did work – and it required time and effort from all concerned – was restoring the addicts’ self-respect and giving them a place back in the community.

Social breakdown is a complicated story, but the bottom line is grinding poverty and a desperate lack of parenting. What do you do? Blame single mothers (a hugely difficult job at the best of times) and absent fathers (few of whom had any male mentor themselves), or ask, well, how can we help? How can we, as a collective, parent these traumatised children? How can we teach them self-respect and therefore other-respect? If we don’t, then who will?

A few days ago, I went to pay my respects to the Peckham Peace Wall, set up by local theatre company Peckham Shed, on the boarded up Poundland shop in the main shopping street. (Yes, Poundland. How desperate is that?) The first two boards are already on display in Peckham library, so this is the second set to be covered in post-it notes. Along with: ‘Please stop’ and ‘Why?’ there were many, many ‘I love Peckham’, ‘Peckham is home’ and ‘Inspire our youth.’ One of my favourites was: ‘This is the first place I could call home (Somali man)’.

People were looking, smiling and taking pictures. It is the kind of news I want to see splashed all over Murdoch’s and all the other media, because these people far outnumber the rioters.

I never really liked Peckham that much before. But I do now. You know why? Because I can feel its warmth.

www.postriotpeckham.wordpress.com

I Talk to the Trees, Part II

When Africa’s most famous shaman happens to be staying with a friend but a short bus ride away (which in London, is practically next door), it would seem churlish not to go and have a ‘personal divination’ session with him now, wouldn’t it?

And so it was that I found myself nervously double-checking bus timetables early one May morning, in desperation not to be late for my 9am appointment with Dr Malidoma Patrice Some. Apart from sheer curiosity, having been enamoured by the extraordinary accounts of indigenous shamanic life in his books, in truth, I was also searching for something. But that something wasn’t even conscious. It was more like a yearning, a craving to connect with some force I could not even put my finger on. And it felt ominous. Maybe that was why I arrived sweaty and way too early, with a whole swarm of butterflies in my stomach.

Born in 1956 into the Dagara tribe in what is now known as Burkino Faso, West Africa, Dr Some hails from an ancient culture which regards the otherworldy realms of ‘the ancestors’ as real as the scorched red earth the living walk upon. Effectively kidnapped by French Jesuit priests at the heartbreakingly tender age of four, he was uprooted from his culture, assigned to a rigid boarding school regime of Western academic education and primed for priesthood. His allocated mission: to ‘civilise’ his ‘primitive’ compatriots through fundamentalist Christianity.

But by time he reached 19, something in Some snapped. No longer able to tolerate the harshness of the institution, he lost control of his anger and, to his horror, found himself pushing a priest through a glass window. Knowing that such a sin was virtually unredeemable, he had no choice but to start walking; out of the immaculately tended grounds of the seminary and into the primordial wilderness he had long since left behind. It took him four days to walk home, taking rest on roadsides and drinking dewdrops from jungle leaves.

Despite the wails of grief-stricken joy at his return, he arrived back a stranger to his village, having lost his native tongue. In order to reintegrate, the village elders declared he must undergo the customary initiation ceremony that all Dagara boys take at puberty. Documented in Some’s landmark book on African shamanism ‘Of Water and the Spirit’, the process took several weeks, involved ritual magic and, apparently, travelling into fantastical otherworldy dimensions. It was accepted that not every boy would make it back alive as a man. Dr Some, however, did and therefore earned his destiny. His life purpose, the elders later told him, is inscribed within his name. ‘Malidoma’: to make friends with the enemy.

Friend and mentor to many luminaries in the human potential movement in America, where he is now based (although he visits his village regularly), one of Malidoma’s jobs is explaining concepts like technology, materialism and our fast-paced, stressed out culture to his fellow villagers.

The preparatory email told me that I should expect the divination session to ‘evolve outside of linear time’; and to reveal what I already knew ‘in my bones’.

I expected Malidoma to be fierce, somewhat imposing. Taking into account his proficiency in both Dagara and French, I certainly didn’t expect his soft American accent, mega-watt smile, easy humour and laid-back nature. Sitting with him felt more like hanging out on some American sidewalk, shooting the breeze with a wise old-timer who slaps his knee every so often, laughing at the absurdity of life.

‘Well now,’ he cooed in a low voice, as he surveyed the divination spread. ‘Let’s take a look at what we got here.’

‘Mmmmm. You were born into this world as a heart person,’ he announced thoughtfully. ‘Love is your vibration. People like you struggle in this Western world where there is so much scarcity of heart.’ It’s true. I cannot watch the news. The violence makes me feel ill. It has always baffled me how we can bomb other countries and not even count the dead, let alone care for the traumatised relatives left behind, yet at the same time set up charities to help ‘our’ traumatised troops. As far as I’m concerned, everyone is ‘ours’. Then there is the plight of traumatised refugees. Researching and reporting on the thousands of refused asylum seekers forced into legalised destitution upset me so much, I had to give up writing about it. ‘Yes, anything that is violent, wrong or inhumane, you are going to react badly to. The Dagara see people like you as alien within your own culture. You have to accept that your place will always be on the margins.’

It was the kind of advice I really wish I had heard when I was, say, fifteen.

As readers of this blog know, throughout my life I have been dogged by a rather nasty strain of the ‘not-good-enoughs’, something I believe most of us experience, except we’ve become adept at covering it up. The Dagara consider what Malidoma describes as ‘a sense of vulnerability, worthlessness and having no identity’, as a bona fide sickness. They even have a name for it: dopwa.

A few weeks previously I had blogged about the shamanic view of mental illness. In Dagara culture, mental illness is seen as a spiritual crisis of the soul, not a shameful weakness. As I wrote, I remembered how close I once came to a nervous breakdown myself, during a time when I felt like the world’s biggest failure (one big bout of ‘dopwa’), mourning the loss of both a relationship and the business we had worked so hard to build, yet which crashed anyway. I was lucky enough to have friends who gave me a job, a place to live in the countryside and space to fall apart. I also remembered that I loved spending time alone with trees. Ah yes, the trees…

It must have been about 5am one morning, a few weeks before meeting Malidoma, when I woke up with a strong urge to go find some trees to hang out with. Something in me was snapping, I knew it; I could feel that disorientating inner wobble so reminiscent of my breakdown. I was in the midst of the deeply uncomfortable realisation that my habit of blaming my partner for ‘making me feel bad about myself’, was really a cover for my own unresolved shame. This pattern had been running for so long, it was a shock to see how deluded I had been, not to mention how I had been subtly – and not so subtly – withdrawing from him. What was underneath this ‘cover story’ was a part of me so painfully raw, it was jangling my nerves.

The call of the wild soon got the better of the thoughts whirling around my mind as I lay in bed, so I threw on my jogging gear and headed up to the park, so early that the gates were still locked. Unable to wait a moment longer, I hurried around the back, along the spiky railings, until I found a street name sign to stand upon. Hoisting myself up (and managing to catch and rip my sweatpants on the way over), I landed with a thud onto undergrowth and brambles, almost putting my hip out of joint, giggling at the ridiculousness of what I was doing. Yet I felt such huge relief. I often want to touch and lean against trees but don’t dare to in public – certainly not in London – but now I could do what I liked. The park was mine – all mine!

I ran to a patch of meadow amongst a grove of elegant trees, sat on the earth, put my head in my hands and cried.

I cannot possibly tell you everything that transpired in my session with Malidoma (a girl has to have some secrets), but I have to tell you this: About half way in, he announced: ‘I have two rituals for you to do in nature, which will help you re-tune yourself, come home, to your heart frequency. One of them has to do with trees…’

I almost fell off my chair.

‘Oh’ I squeaked, ‘I cannot believe you said that!’ My crack-of-dawn park escapade story came tumbling out of my mouth. We both hooted with delight. No, he had not read my blog. Yes, he absolutely understood. ‘Hey, you were like a little girl running home… home to your authentic self,’ he grinned. ‘Whenever you feel the world has abandoned you, the trees will always welcome you.’

The trees will always welcome me… See, I never knew this intellectually or rationally (I mean, how ridiculous?) but deep down, in a non-verbal kind of way, it made complete sense. It is when I feel my calmest and most satiated; a kind of primal nourishment, which, I suppose, is the feeling behind the term: ‘mother nature’.

By the time the session was up, it was barely 10am, yet I felt like so much had happened during that hour, time itself must have expanded to accommodate it. Indeed, the native Dagara have no concept of clock time; it is yet another of those tricky concepts Malidoma has to explain to them.

So yes, I did experience a kind of time-warp and yes, I did find out what I know in my bones: that I am a bona fide tree hugger. Hell, I be can’t be anything else, so I might was well enjoy it. Oh, and, by the way, the benefits of spending time with trees – talking, hugging or simply lurking nearby – have now been proved by science (see link below).

Oh, how sweet it is to know that old hippies like me were right – nay, sane! – all along. I am coming out as a tree hugger. Join me!

http://wellbeingmagazine.co.uk/article/tree-hugging-improves-your-health

www.malidoma.org