Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  Engaging in play at an early age helps the child discover what he wants to become, or, rather, what the daimon wants of him. Learning to follow flow is a skill essential to attending to one's passion and calling, and it is learned young. Yet we frequently interrupt the child at play, pulling their focus towards the practicalities of timetables and the dominance of the ‘real’. Imagination requires concentration and absolute attention. It requires others to respect the imagination at work. Play is a child's job.

  These observations do not only apply to the realm of childhood. The obsessions and necessities of imagination in creative tasks need our focus. Too often we do not respect the pull of our creativity; frequently we interrupt it by always giving priority to the mundane activities of life and the demands of the modern way.

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  28. Going to Source

  …Here, within the slow refrain of stone, is water plaited round a rock128

  When my friend Veronica invited me to stay in her rural cottage in Wales, I thought I would much rather visit Mali or Cambodia. The United Kingdom seems too familiar, embedded as it is in my psyche from childhood through fairy tales and marmalade, murderous kings and crown jewels, roses and the Brontés. If I were to travel, I reasoned, I wanted mystery and difference. Going to Britain would feel like going backwards.

  But Veronica is also a writer, and we had spent a prolific ten days together in my Cape Town home, bent over our laptops, reading each other's work, encouraging and challenging each other over coffee at the local deli. We are good for each other in the creative domain. At some point, Veronica let slip that she might not be able to keep the Welsh retreat for much longer in addition to her London flat. Then she clinched it by telling me about St Cybi's well.

  There are wellsprings situated all over Ireland and Wales that have been attributed with healing properties for centuries. Initially pagan sites, they were annexed by the Catholic church early in the first millennium AD, and each assigned a saint. St Cybi (pronounced, disappointingly, Cubbi) has presided over a well in northern Wales on the Lleyn Peninsula since the sixth century. The sick would travel there as the waters were said to heal many conditions, from blindness to scrofula. Pilgrims on their way to the abbey on Bardsay Island, another holy site off the tip of the peninsula, would also stop over at the well.

  It was suddenly clear to me that I would make a pilgrimage to St Cybi's well; a year earlier, I had attended a workshop on ‘Returning to the Source’ run by the Jungian analyst and author, Sylvia Perera. She had visited and researched most of the Celtic wellsprings in Ireland, and in the workshop she presented an ancient approach to both healing and consulting the oracle that has been used for millennia. Sylvia illustrated how this approach derives from and refers back to the psyche as helper, or source. She outlined nine steps to this process of how to approach the well, how to ask for and to receive healing or an answer, and how to return to one's life and integrate what one has received.

  Few of us make pilgrimages to actual healing wellsprings, but we all turn to places of calm and comfort, and of revelation and encouragement. Dreams, poetry, gardening, prayer, painting, dancing, meditation, singing, making love, and walking in nature are some examples of journeying to source for a sense of connectedness, guidance and healing.

  The first step on the ancient path to the wellspring was to set one's intention. The physically sick wished for healing. Those that consulted the oracle wanted advice concerning relationships, work or politics. But the goal is often not conscious as we venture towards source, and as I boarded the plane to Gatwick, I had no special intention.

  On my first day in Wales, Veronica took me to St Cybi's well. We approached it through an old metal gate and across a field, through an opening in a mossy stone wall and down a path next to the stream. There was no-one else about, no stalls selling kitschy mementos, no tours, no restaurants. We came to a ruin of an ancient stone building set against dark trees. There were two chambers within its walls, one containing the small bath fed by the spring, and the other containing a large hearth where travellers would rest after drinking from and immersion in the sacred waters, while they waited for healing.

  The rain, as we stripped off our clothes, was colder than the water. We dipped and drank, and drank again from the clear, delicious water, and dripped our way back to the car.

  That night after supper, sitting around the fire playing Balderdash with Veronica's children and grandchildren, I felt very close to source. It felt as though an unformed and unarticulated question of mine had nevertheless been answered. I was reminded that the psyche reveals itself in images rather than words, and that concerns do not necessarily need to be expressed verbally in order to get a response from the realm of the unconscious.

  I am younger than Veronica, and my sons are leaving home. I have been suffering a natural grief concerning a normal loss, yet knowing that has not felt helpful. Welcomed into the circle of Veronica's extended family, I saw her grandchildren turning their beautiful, open faces to her with questions and observations. I witnessed her heartfelt and practical help. Their interaction with her was a moving, living example of the return to source. I felt encouraged and healed.

  Life and Psyche keep bubbling up like water from the depths; both day and night they continually offer refreshment and opportunities. All we need do is drink.

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  29. Adequate Images

  We comprehend… that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet Is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate Imagery Is a danger of the same magnitude. …What have we done to our Images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before … If we do not develop adequate Images we will die out like dinosaurs.

  Werner Herzog, film maker129

  Advertising corrupts the image. Stasis too can do this. Through denial and self-deception, and the refusal to participate creatively in the psyche, we become stuck with stagnant images of ourselves and of the world. As the free flow of information molecules in the body is optimal for health, so also is the free interplay of image.

  Perfection is one such fixed and dominant image in our airbrushed culture. When we aim for perfection, we madly split off from all the other aspects of life that end up somewhere else as other people's problems. The methods we use in attempting to achieve the god-like goal of perfection – pesticides, genetic engineering, disposables, experiments on animals, cheap energy, flying in out-of season produce – can become the suffering and problems of others. The convenience and economy of inexpensive clothing and food and our disposable way of life may be directly related to the inconvenience of others working in sweat shops and coal mines or to the suffering of animals in battery farms, or to the hidden costs of people and animals living next to or affected by rubbish dumps and nuclear plants.

  Splitting our world into perfection on the one side and waste and ugliness on the other also means that we see excrement as disgusting and germ-filled, rather than as part of the natural round of eating, digesting, excreting and fertilizing. Our urine and faeces are intended to put back into the soil what we have taken from it, so as to feed those plants that have fed and will again feed us. Peasant farmers know this. A friend, while visiting India, saw farmers squatting in their rice paddies in the mornings. Maxine Hong Kingston relates in her book China Men how, if a farmer had to defecate while visiting a neighbour, he would take his turd home for his own crops. Excrement was regarded as valuable.

  But since we discovered that faeces can be the carrier of serious disease, we have changed our attitude, and are disgusted to the point that we cannot even deal with our children's poo in towelling nappies. Instead we throw their excrement into the bin for someone else to deal with.

  We cannot recognise the good in the bad, nor the bad in what we consider to be good. We become more and more distanced from the eternal cycle of the
ways of the world and of nature.

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  The traditional Native American way recommends that, before we commit to a course of action, we should consider the consequences seven generations hence. If our culture took that seriously, we would have to slow down. We would consider and reconsider, rather than rushing ahead on the adrenalin of instant gratification and immediate results. It would also result in extreme conservativism, and would obstruct much innovation and spontaneity.

  If we stopped to examine our actions, we would have to consider that for every gain there is a loss, and for every loss there is a gain. Everything that stands tall in the light of innovation and discovery throws down a long shadow. In the documentary Corporation (2003), a business magnate who runs a carpet making empire comes across a book that sets out how human progress is destroying the planet. Instead of engaging the default mode of defensiveness, denial and shifting the blame, he takes this on. His factories are being redesigned towards natural solutions, and he has become a motivational speaker at business conferences. He tells his colleagues that business entrepreneurs, like himself, regard themselves as ‘the captains of industry’, but they are, in fact, the ‘plunderers of the earth’.

  Over the years I have attended to many patients who have been in motor vehicle accidents. Not one has ever told me that they caused it. It seems that it is extremely difficult for human beings to admit responsibility for their actions. This is in part a problem of imagination. We are, on the whole, invested in an image of who we are which may well be way off the mark.

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  One way of getting to know ourselves better is through the imaginative, creative act. I find it liberating to put myself in the shoes of someone I think of as being different to me. Through writing, dance, drawing, voice work, or even music, I can imagine my way into how it feels to be absolutely anything -selfish, furious, gentle, beautiful, disabled, animal, murderous, dead, a different gender or nationality, or old. The playwright, Sam Shepard says he loves that writing gives him the ability to be a woman, or a child.

  Creative exploration loosens us up out of our habitual ways of experiencing the world. A creative project allows us to act out our deepest shadow fantasies and fears in safety, rather than going out to throw bricks through windows, to give someone a bloody nose or to sleep with a stranger, with all the regrets and consequences that follow. It allows expression to the things we have wisely or unwisely repressed, which could otherwise grow into a rabid monster living under the metaphorical stairs. It can cultivate empathy for others, and foster integrity – the capacity to be a congruent person who is in touch with all aspects of her personality. It exercises the neural circuits that have to do with the imaginal.

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  The psychoanalyst Lena Vasileva proposes that the norm is an enemy of the artist, as it destroys the imagination. The norm hides the extremes of light and dark in psychological life. She claims that darkness is a necessary driver for the creative process, and that imperfection and creativity are essential partners. 130

  ‘Normal’ truncates our aesthetic choices. If it is true that the task of life is to develop who we are or who we are meant to be, it requires a switched-on and tuned-in imagination. If I am to develop my character, I must foster an aesthetic which has little to do with the mainstream. How we dress, what objects we live with, the rhythms of our lives, how we spend our time, the food we eat and how we prepare it, what our gardens look like, what animals we live with, how we move and sing, all display character. They are the result of how we engage with life on a continuum from the functional to the decorative. We might decide to live with our grandparent's furniture for most of our lives, or to abandon city life to live in a seaside shack. We might shave our hair off or only wear white cotton.

  We all need to develop the main character of our lives, and we need imagination to do it. Story plays an essential part in the development of a child's talent for life. Yet nowadays there is little emphasis on the importance for all children to be exposed to stories from an early age, other than those on television. And television is usually a poor substitute for books. Unlike fairy stories or folk lore, TV emphasises the norm through programme content and invasive advertisements; through its visual nature it supplants much of what would otherwise be imagined by the child (as everyone knows who has seen their childhood story favourites from Alice in Wonderland to Pooh Bear morphed into Disney clones); and it dispenses with the storyteller, the adult or older sibling who reads the book or tells the tale, and who can interact with the child around images and words.

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  Culturally, we have a tendency to see things in relation to their opposites. The binary of good/bad, up/down, in/out, happy/ sad, sick/well, asleep/awake, tense/relaxed, old/young all contain the image of the split. On closer examination, this is usually a false construct. Life is more like a rheostat than a switch. Yet we turn most things into either this or that, setting up a situation where we must cast our lots in with one side or the other and announce the winner, or the correct way of being. Thinking in opposites does not allow for gradation and nuance. It promotes domination, victimisation and control. The binary is anxiety-provoking, turning everything into a this or a that, a right or a wrong, a black or a white. Experiencing life as multiplicity is not only anxiety-relieving, it is also closer to the truth of the way life really operates: as a palette or range.

  It would appear that the binary is starting to break down. In academia, the old ways of segregating everything are giving way. The traditional world view of the specialist focusing in on one field is making way for the expert who can read the interconnectedness of life. A marine biologist famous for his work concerning reproduction in the sea urchin is being superseded by those who are researching the interplay of all life forms in the intertidal zones. The science of the singular is being replaced by the ecology of dynamic pluralism.

  In behavioural science there is increasing acknowledgement that we are the product of the interplay of complex factors, not only of our genetic expression. Instead of the linear, determinist influence of DNA, Greenspan and Shanker suggest that the old debate of nature versus nurture is a false one. They show that our genetic inheritance and our environment are constantly influencing each other, and they liken this to the way Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers communicated with each other on the dance floor.131

  In the field of epigenetics, scientists are researching all factors that influence the development of an organism in addition to DNA. How, when and why a gene expresses itself is a function of the intra- and extracellular environment. There appears to be a conversation going on at this level too.

  In the field of neuroimmunology, these shifts are also apparent. I was taught at medical school that the endocrine, nervous and immune systems operated virtually independently of each other. They existed as hierarchies with the brain as top dog. We were taught that neurotransmitters are the substances that convey information across the synaptic gap between nerve endings. Now scientists have found that neurotransmitters exist in many parts of the body, and are often released at quite a distance from the receptor. They exist in large concentrations in the gut, and also on cells belonging to the immune system. In fact, neurotransmitters that initiate and control mood in the brain are also secreted by cells in the immune system.132 Our physiology is co-ordinated by the actions of these discrete and specific messenger or information molecules, or psychoimmunoendocrine network.133

  The implications of this new way of understanding the functioning of the body are enormous. Firstly, they challenge the dualistic and reductionist model of mind and body as distinct and frequently oppositional entities. They also suggest that our emotions are linked to the flow and functioning of information molecules, and that we need the free flow of emotion as one of the important components of information in the physical system.

  It strikes me that ideas about the body seem to reflect the Zeitgeist, or the dominant way systems are described in other disciplines. The Newtonian/C
artesian idea of the world is mechanistic, dualistic and hierarchically determined. A hierarchy implies that orders get handed down from something or someone who oversees, controls and is in charge of the entire operation, whereas a network denotes a system where power and knowledge do not reside in any one part, but are expressed by means of interaction.

  Bosnak's approach to working with the psyche by holding disparate images simultaneously in the body also operates on the level of the network. Information from all parts of the system – even contradictory notions – needs to be present for new knowledge to arise.

  In a network, as opposed to a hierarchy, there might well be connections that do not operate according to cause and effect. This would allow for synchronicity. Networks might permit paradox and contradiction to co-exist without cancelling each other out, revealing a multifaceted view of reality.

  Another fallen image from my medical school days is how a drug works at cellular level. We were taught that a drug activated a receptor on a cell rather like a key fitting into a lock. Candace Pert has shown that this stiff, mechanistic analogy is incorrect, and that information molecules and drugs act on the receptor through vibrations.134

  The images held by our society and by scientists about the way things work are under review. Perhaps we need to review our own images as well.