Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry for 14 May 2023 

Note: For Mother’s Day this year, I thought it would be appropriate for me to bring back the poem I wrote for my mom for her 75th birthday nearly 20 years ago, April 7 2004. (At that time, she exclaimed, delightedly, “I get a poem… and I don’t even have to be dead!”) Although she passed on eleven years ago, in 2012, and I’ve written plenty of other pieces for/about her in the meantime, this one I think best captures what she has – and continues – to mean to me. 

Further note: I’ve been going through old files lately, and last night I found the “Robert Jr” folder my mom kept about me, full of old poems and letters, along with a few photos. Amongst all this stuff about me, on small pieces of paper, I found a series of hand-written, undated affirmations that she wrote about/to/for me at one time or another. In them she wrote that she loved me, and God loved me, and that I was going to be all right and would do good things in my life. I never saw these handwritten pieces, did not even know they existed until now. Small prayers, tucked into this folder and perhaps forgotten, but still: messages, angels, blessings down the years. 

 

1. Science as Love and Relationship

 

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

 

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

 

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

 

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

 

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

 

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

 

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

 

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

 

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

 

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

 

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

 

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

 

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

 

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

 

 

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

 

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

 

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

 

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

 

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

 

 

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

 

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

 

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

 

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

 

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

 

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

 

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

 

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

 

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

 

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

 

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other.

 

 

The Adventure Continues…

Entry for 25 March 2023:

 

Sixteen and a half years ago we moved to Scotland for ten years.  Yes, we know that the math doesn’t add up, except in the calculus of the heart. We were exiles, living in Scotland, but we found that we were warmly welcomed.  We went on regular Saturday adventures, many, many adventures. We must have seen every standing castle in central Scotland, and a fair number that are now just piles of fallen stone. We made new friends, started new projects, made a life for ourselves there.  I wrote and posted more than 500 entries of this blog.

 

And then, as the years went on, even as our mothers died, I had surgery for prostate cancer, our children finished their PhDs, and grandchildren arrived, we found that we weren’t quite ready to go back. There was crucial work to do: meta-analyses to carry out and publish, a new course to start, a lively church community, the folk club we loved even on an off night. There were adventures we’d never gotten around to, like the islands of Skye and Lewis.  And America, with its toxic politics, self-absorption and gun violence, did not much appeal. 

 

So in 2016, instead of going back the US, we settled into a routine of commuting between Glasgow, Scotland, and Pleasanton, California, staying in each place for a month at a time.  This made a lot of sense when my mother-in-law was still alive, in that we were able to support her during our time there. However, after a year of this she suddenly died, leaving us to continue as we had done previously, on automatic pilot. In the meantime, the new MSc in Counselling started and I switched to 60% time, allowing me more time for research and writing projects while still staying involved with teaching and delivering EFT training. 

 

This went on for several years… until the pandemic arrived. At that point, we made the decision to stay in Scotland, where I could keep teaching online and where the public health policy made more sense. At the same time, the climate crisis emerged as more significant for us and led us to become more uncomfortable with the level of carbon emissions we were producing by flying so much.  At the same time, a wonderful opportunity emerged in the form of the EmpoweringEFT@EU project for developing curricula for training more EFT supervisors and trainers.  I retired from teaching in late 2021 but stayed on for yet another year on a researcher contract as part of this project. 

 

In the meantime, we set about the project of making our condo in California more carbon neutral.  We replaced our old natural gas furnace (which was leaking carbon monoxide) with a high-efficiency heat pump.  We spent a year getting a solar energy system installed on our roof; this took some doing because we were the first in our development to do so and the Board was deeply suspicious what a potpourri different solar panels would do to the look and feel of our development.  These are things that we could not do in Scotland, since we didn’t own our flat there.

 

Finally, this month, it was time for the leaving of Scotland. We located a moving company and began sorting through our things: We were going to have to squeeze our two parallel lives into one life; a significant downsizing in both Scotland and California were required.  In the end, we got rid of roughly half of our stuff in Scotland, by giving much of it away to the Counselling Unit/Research Clinic (books, journals and data), to the British Heart Foundation or the Salvation Army, or to friends.  A few things we sold on Gumtree, which turned out to be amusing but time-consuming (every object sold involved some kind of little drama).. 

Moving Lorry: Bound for Far California

This week, the movers came on Monday & Tuesday and the British Heart Foundation came on Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday were taken up with cleaning and getting rid of the rest of our stuff.  Finally, on Friday afternoon we finished the cleaning of our flat and left, after 16 years in the same close, dropping our keys through the mail slot.  After a bit of drama at the Dawsholm recycling centre (Diane fell and twisted her ankle while getting rid of some of our last cardboard), we dropped our car off at the garage where we bought it 7 years ago. We are now flying back to the USA, leaving our Scottish life behind.

Robert in empty flat, with Mom's Butterfly Hanging

 

What’s next for us? Stay tuned!

On Nonbinariness: A Talk Given at Westhope Presbyterian Church, Saratoga, California

1. Introduction

 

Marjorie Pearson asked me if I’d be willing to talk here today. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with Marjorie over the years, and really appreciate how open she has been to my issues about my gender identity.

 

She was interested in why I recently decided to add “they/them” as my preferred pronoun; before this I didn’t specify a pronoun at all.

 

My “coming out” has so far consisted of adding this information about my pronoun preferences to my email signatures on my personal and work email accounts, and to my Zoom label.

 

I’ve never really talked about my gender identity publicly before, and hardly ever privately.

 

2. Gender and Spirituality

 

Where to start?

I can remember being uncomfortable with male gender roles when I was a kid.

For a long time I was afraid to grow up, because I feared I would become a callous, hard man.  Over the years, my experiences of deeply understanding my many female clients only confirmed my fears, and as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man.

 

In fact, the most important spiritual figures in my life were women: my mother, my grandmother, my childhood mentor Margaret.

 

I experienced my father as generally a kind, wise person who was not forceful, avoided conflict and was a bit distant.  Also, his wisdom was more worldly.  Although his insights were valuable and interesting, they didn’t strike me as spiritual or particularly inspiring.  In the end, for me he was more of a fellow traveller on the same or a similar road.

 

On the other hand, it was my mother, grandmother and my friend Margaret who were strong, inspiring, powerful.  I do have to say that in the case of my mother and grandmother they were also rather controlling. 

 

However, these three people deeply inspired me to do more and to be more; I went to church with all of them; they provided a strong moral compass for me; and they helped me get closer to God.

 

This was important, because from a pretty young age, I had real trouble getting my head around male images of God.  For me, God has always been female.  Nevertheless, to try to find a less extreme position, my compromise has been to adopt a gender-balanced trinity: Jesus/son = male; Holy Spirit = female & Father replaced by a gender neutral Parent.

 

In church, I’ve always been more comfortable when there was a female priest (I’m pretty much a life-long Episcopalian), although gay men will do if needed (and have done for most of the past 25 years).

 

3. Growing up Female-Identified

 

From a young age, I was pretty much always more interested in girls and women than boys and men. 

 

I can remember imagining having long hair.  In the 1950’s and early 1960’s it was always cut short, as was the custom for boys then, but I don’t think I was ever really comfortable with that.  Then around 1970 I started growing it out into a gender neutral Afro.  When that stopped working for me around 2000, I started growing what hair I had left out into a pony tail; at that point, my dad was doing the same thing with his hair, as were my two sons.  It felt good to finally be able to do that.

 

So I guess you could say that I’m “female identified”: Certainly, my main role model has been my grandmother, who was public figure (radio and TV personality) in Chicago, then retired to become a professional writer. From a young age I aspired to be like her. Also, as I was the oldest of her grandchildren, she encouraged me.

 

It’s hard to know, but I think I might have preferred to have been born as a female.  In addition to having long hair, I think I would have liked to have been able to have children, scary and difficult as that can be.  I feel somehow incomplete as a human being for not having had that experience, and even guilty for having evaded the process.  Although I love my two boys and do not for a second regret who they are, I certainly would have been happy for us to have had girls, and to have helped to raise them as strong women. 

 

4. Finding a Balance Professionally & Personally

 

I have certainly found it fulfilling to have been a therapist for many women, who have certainly given me plenty of vicarious experiences of what complete jerks men can be.  As I noted earlier, as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man, even as I worked to support my female clients in developing their own sense of personal power, helping them maintain a balance between their need to be themselves and their need for connection with the important people in their lives.  In recent years, as I’ve come to work with more people from East Asian, I have come to pride myself in being a kind of wise “auntie” to many of them, occupying the role that might have been provided by an experienced older female figure in many traditional cultures.

 

But of course I live in the body of a man. I don’t necessarily reject that, but as I’ve been saying I identify more with women and strongly value the more traditionally “feminine” parts of me: empathy, emotionality, sensitivity, poetry, and an interest in the arts and music, as well as literature. I’m not interested in dominating or “winning”. So in general I tend to feel like I have more in common with women than men, and would rather hang out with them.  I’ve always tended to have more female than male friends, and have in my career really benefitted from a succession of female mentors and therapists. 

 

5. Psychological Androgyny and the “They/them/their”

 

In the 1980’s, psychological androgyny was a big thing in academic psychology, and that always made a lot of sense to me.  Psychological androgyny is the idea that we are all mixtures of traditionally male and female characteristics, and that maybe the ideal might be a flexible balance of characteristics traditionally associated with men and women.  Thus, for me personally, the pronouns “she/her/hers” and “he/him/his” can seem too limiting; for this reason, “they/them/their” are my current preferred pronouns.

 

Nowadays, of course, I think a lot of people feel like psychological androgyny is too limiting:  Why should certain characteristics be associated with women and others with men?  Why can’t women (and men) have whatever characteristics are true and work for them? That makes sense to me, but perhaps because I was brought up with traditional gender role stereotypes, I still like the idea of psychological androgyny, even with its somewhat outdated dialectic of traditional gender roles. But here I am.

 

Lastly, like my grandmother, I have ended up a writer, although not of novels like her but of professional and scientific books and articles about psychotherapy and psychotherapy research.  And that is where I discovered the appeal of “they/them/their” to refer to generic people whose gender wasn’t known, or whose gender wasn’t relevant.  This is actually an old usage in English, going back centuries, so in spite of what most of us were taught in school, I happily abandoned the use of generic masculine pronouns and now find myself preferring gender neutral pronouns.  Long live “they/them/their”!  I’ll take them, and happily embrace myself as a slightly queer, nonbinary person.

 

After all the times we’ve said goodbye (Haiku sequence)

 

            1

 

Three weeks: we haven’t

Seen so much of you for years

But now it must end.

 

Last morning: dropping

you off at the train station:

we hope you don’t break!

 

Little suitcase rattling

Behind, you roll away on

the balls of your feet.

 

From the car we watch

between gray cement columns

as you disappear.

 

Driving away, I’m

almost blinded by tears I

cannot drive away.

 

 

            2

 

So many goodbyes,

more than thirty years; why does

this one hurt so much?

 

Like after two years

when you finally made it

to kindergarten.

 

You don’t fight, you don’t

protest; you just turn and

walk bravely away.

 

Why does it always

feel like I’m the one leaving,

and not you somehow?

 

            3

 

There’s melodrama

to this leaving, feeling I

may not see you again.

 

A part of me won’t

let go of you, so I can

hold on to myself.

 

Like saying goodbye

to you is hard because it’s

goodbye to me too.

 

 

            4

 

But more than that I

want to see you free, flying

out across the sky.

 

I imagine your

migration, the worlds you find

beyond my end.

 

To end, a blessing:

do good, take our love with you,

enjoy the journey.

 

                                                -Love, Dad, 10-17 Jan 2022, Pleasanton

 

Note: Saying goodbye again to Kenneth this year reminded me of the poem I'd written about a previous goodbye last year, so I'm taking this as an opportunity to belatedly post this piece.

Can we learn empathy? An Integrative Framework with Fifteen Suggestions

I prepared the following for an interview with Lou Cooper recorded for her podcast, Talking Emotions.  The topic was “Can We Learn Empathy?”  I started writing a few notes but it gradually grew into something more ambitious: A framework for integrating what I’ve learned about empathy over the past 20-plus years.  I’m sharing it here to make it available more widely. -Robert Elliott

 

1.0 Short answer: Yes, within limits and under the right conditions.

 

But: It depends on what we mean by empathy. 

 

1.1 Definitions & metaphors for empathy: ordinary language: to feel into another person’s experience; to under-stand what they are going through; to be in tune with them; follow what they are saying; to grasp their meaning; even to discern their true meaning when this isn’t clear

            -Notice: the different metaphors we use to talk about empathy; more on that later.

 

1.2 Also: we can think of empathy both as an act or behaviour, and as a skill or ability.

 

2.0 Slightly longer answer:

2.1 For empathy as an act/something I do, it is something that I can learn do more often… But: there’s a lot of bad empathy around, which does no one good, and could even be unhelpful (frustrating, sometimes even harmful). That means it’s a good idea to learn how to do it well. Which brings us to:

2.2 For Empathy as an ability, a skill; it is something I can learn to do better. And: This is really what we want.

 

3.0 The long, complicated answer:

 

3.1 First: Let’s start with the idea that empathy is complicated: We’re not going to learn empathy (or get better at it) by thinking about it in simplistic ways, like:

3.1.1 Thinking that empathy is just mirroring responses (“reflections”), because by themselves these don’t work (meta-analysis)

3.1.2 Thinking that empathy is just identifying with a particular person, because that can overwhelm us (eg with trauma) or lead us to lose empathy for other people

3.1.3 Thinking that empathy is just adopting an attitude of being nice to the other person, because that can lead us to do it in a clumsy, superficial or unhelpful way

 

3.2 Second: it’s important to know that as far as we can tell, empathy appears to be made up of something like three different psychological (brain) processes:

3.2.1 An automatic emotional mirroring or resonance process: we’re probably born with this, but growing up we might learn to suppress this, because it can be painful (=empathic resonance)

3.2.2  A deliberate process of trying to imagine someone else’s experience, to put ourselves in their shoes (=imaginative entry)

3.2.3  A process of regulating our automatic empathic distress at the other person’s distress, so that we don’t feel the need to try to shut down their pain to make ourselves feel better (emotion self-regulation).  This will enable us to stay with the first two processes and explore ways to help the other person (e.g., just by listening)

 

3.2.4 To learn to get better at empathy, it’s good to work on each of these three psychological processes:

3.2.4.1 (1) Stop suppressing our natural empathic resonance: We can become aware of how we interrupt or block our natural empathy and try to not do it (more in a minute)

3.2.4.2 (2) Actively practice imaginative entry with other people: We can take a counselling skills class; or ask other people to let us practice with them (don’t practice with them without asking their permission!)

3.2.4.3 (3) Learn emotion self-regulation about others’ distress: We can practice accepting our distress at other people’s distress; or tell ourselves we are OK & can handle this; or, if we need to, we can find a trusted other (friend, therapist or supervisor) to share this distress with.

 

3.3 Third, it will help to keep in mind that empathy is complicated because overlaps with a bunch of related processes. Some of these related processes are empathy traps that can get in the way, while others are empathy supports that can make our empathy deeper and more powerful:

3.3.1 Empathy traps:

3.3.1.1 (Over-)Identification: seeing someone else as like us can cause problems, because no two people are ever exactly alike, and true empathy involves both understanding how they are like us and how they are not like us

3.3.1.2 Sympathy: feeling sorry for someone else (pity) can easily back-fire, because people often don’t like to be pitied, because it can put them in a one-down position or shame them

3.3.2 Empathy Supports:

3.3.2.1 Compassion: feeling with someone else, usually actively caring for them in their vulnerability or suffering

3.3.2.2 Appreciation: valuing someone for themselves, usually in a nonpossessive way

 

3.3.3 So: to learn to get better at empathy, it’s useful for us to learn to avoid the empathy traps and build the empathy supports:

3.3.3.1 (4) Recognise when we are over-identifying with the other person, when we’ve lost our perspective and are just agreeing with them, or assuming they agree with us.  This is not empathy, and can lead to us getting overwhelmed or completely misunderstanding the other person

3.3.3.2 (5) Recognise when we are falling into the sympathy trap of feeling sorry for or pitying the other person, which is likely to make them feel diminished or one down: Remember that when people are in distress they usually need us to understand more than to agree with them.

3.3.3.3 (6) Support your empathy with genuine compassion and appreciation for the other person: Let ourselves experience the other person as a fellow human being who is both hurting and also an active agent in their own life, valuable just for who they are and worthy of respect.

 

3.4. Fourth, we can get better at empathy if we learn about empathy conditions, that is, to do it in the right way and at the right times.  In other words, to be effective empathy requires a bunch of other things to be present. You or I can become more truly and helpfully empathic if we make sure the following empathy conditions are met:

3.4.1 (7)  I have to want to know the other person or persons; otherwise I won’t bother (motivation)

3.4.2 (8) I have to genuinely resonate with their experience; it’s not enough to go through the motions, to just say the words, to fake it (genuineness)

3.4.3. (9) I have to have a bit of distance from their experience (but not too much!), so that I don’t over-identify with them and lose myself in their experience or impose my own experiences on them (distance)

3.4.4. (10) The other person has to want to have their feelings known by me; otherwise, it will feel intrusive (receptivity)

3.4.5. (11) I have to listen not just to the words, but also the feelings that go along with the words, which may be unspoken (sensitivity)

3.4.6. (12) I have to pay attention to how they react to my empathy, so that I can back off if it’s unwanted or adjust my understandings if they are not accurate (responsiveness)

 

3.5 Finally: It will come easier if we work toward meeting the following additional empathy conditions:

3.5.1 (13) If I’m neurotypical, it will come more naturally (neurotypicality); on the other hand, if I’m neurodiverse, I may have to work harder at it and may need more support, especially if I have trouble accessing or managing the automatic empathic resonance process.

3.5.2 (14) If I invest the time and energy needed to know myself well enough to know when what I’m picking up is my experience rather than the other person’s experience (self-knowledge). This might involve self-study, training or even therapy/counselling

3.5.3 (15) If I practice empathy over time and learn from my mistakes or misunderstandings (skill development). Training and therapy can help with this.

EFT in the Hellenosphere: A Sequence

 

                        1

 

Arriving in Athens:

In the modern marketplace of psychotherapies,

EFT might have found itself homeless,

If the Existential therapists had not taken us in,

Welcoming our dialectics and epistemics,

Our synesthema and thymikos,

Crossing over between essence and existence.

Sing, Muse, of the marvels of emotion, feelings and affect!

 

                        2

 

Training journey:

On Alexander Street,

Hotel in middle of chaotic, busy central Athens.

Tourists ebb and flow by the day:

Portuguese and American, I hear their

Accents rise and fall In the breakfast room;

Row of suitcases, guides in the lobby,

Buses right outside on the busy road.

 

Agathi takes me away from all this,

Her little black Renault zig-zagging

Through a grid of small streets,

Pedestrians dodging us

Between blind corners,

Until we emerge onto bigger roads.

 

Friday traffic terrible, slow progress,

While endless streams of motorcycles

Zoom past us on the white line between lanes.

“It’s worse in the summer,”

She notes.

 

Kifisia, northern suburb,

Is slightly less chaotic,

But the white-walled little institute

Sits on a sunny side street,

Just down the hill form the local

Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St Dimitris,

Domed and glittering,

Banners out for its patron saints’ day.

 

We climb stairs, dodging windows

Opening onto the stairwell,

Up past little meeting rooms

We will use for skills practice,

To an upper room,

Waiting for disciples,

Chairs in a large circle.

Balcony with its view

Of Athens’ great bowl

Between mountains and sea.

 

Here is where the main training

Magic will happen

Over the next four days,

Roads through the human heart,

Emotional deepening and transformation.

 

And sure enough, by Sunday morning,

As we arrive, ancient Orthodox chant

Drifts across the neighborhood

Like incense.

Captures me as I arrive, counterpoint

To the deep heart work we do.

 

 

                        3

 

One-day break between trainings and travel:

We joined the crowds climbing the Panathenaic way.

Acro-polis: High city;

Sacred mountain: tourist destination for centuries.

Sadly reduced: the missing pieces fetishized

White marble statues long pilfered

By kleptomanic Romans, Turks, Brits and other

Colonizers, seeking the blessing

Of their misrepresentation of whiteness.

Supportive Caryatides long stolen,

Replaced by replicas like the curios

Sold in the tourist shops

Of the modern Agora.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                        4

 

Black cassock like a cassowary,

Big-bearded missionary priest,

Orders all the desserts on the menu

So we can break sugar together.

 

Chef seeks our blessing

For his offerings.

 

 

                        5

 

Searching for One Cyprus:

Across the Green Line:

On our side, crowds of people,

Celebrating the holiday,

Restaurants crowded even this early.

 

Then the border posts, people queueing

To show their passports or identity cards.

“Is this your first time?” asks the guard

As he scans mine into his computer.

“Yes” I say, smiling and nodding.

I guess I’m in their system now.

 

A disputed country:

Empty Buffer Zone instead of border,

A few yards of abandoned buildings,

Then another border post

And another passport check.

On the Turkish-occupied side, just a nod.

 

And we enter a mirror universe:

No crowds, just a few people

In the shops and stalls

Goods in Turkish and ₺ (the symbol for Turkish Lira),

Lining the narrow street

In the gathering dusk.

 

Christodoulos, our guide, grizzled, friendly

Archaeologist cum art historian

Helps us read what we’re seeing:

Old churches morphed into mosques or Quran schools;

Figures long effaced, faces erased,

But here above a closed door Jesus remains:

In Islam, he is a prophet after all. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We touch the weathered yellow sandstone building blocks.

Above, wooden balconies jut over our heads.

Twice, our guide points out white marble sarcophagi,

Empty as night comes on

In the narrow quiet streets.

 

Suddenly, the Islamic call to prayer

Eerily winds from old church spire-minarets

Melody melisma-ing up and down.

The same melody I heard days earlier in Athens

Celebrating Saint Dimitris’ Day,

Singing to God with the same song even. 

 

We pass by centuries-old inns preserved by

Economic deprivation:

No prosperity here to throw down

The old buildings, frozen in time.

 

We’re in an alternative universe,

Another possible country.

But in Turkish Cyprus even countryhood

Is questioned, left in limbo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dark now, almost alone,

In the quiet outdoor restaurant

In the courtyard of the Buyuk Han,

We eat humus and dolmades, and more.

 

Then we follow the way

to Rüstem Kitabevi,

Oldest publisher in Cyprus,

Now a coffee house where

Arabic or Greek (who can tell) hard rock

Jangles and bangs from the main room,

Drawing us to the energy.

“Private Party!” says the owner,

As she blocks our way, but offers instead

Another party:  Old books

Modern Islamic art, brightly lit.

A place out of time.

 

Common music and food echo

What the graffiti speak: One Cyprus.

Not the two countries

Proclaimed and striving against one another

By politicians and citizens

asleep to their essential unity,

Connections woven like lace souvenir coasters

Protecting against the evil eyes of envy and division.

 

Someday, maybe: One Cyprus.

Someday, maybe: One World.

 

 

                        6

 

Final night Training dinner celebration:

Preparing to leave Athina-Athens and Kiprou-Cyprus.

So many more souls opening,

Following the deepening roads to the heart,

All of us were touched and changed,

More deeply woven into one another.

 

Afterward, what could be more

Absurd than a salsa-latin fusion band

Playing their hearts out

(“Guantanamera” and “Desposita”)

For El dia de los Muertos

In skeleton costumes…

At a Mexican restaurant in Nicosia?

 

How about falafel and humus vegan tacos?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A perfect ending to our Athens-Cyprus

EFT training adventure,

Twenty-first century psychotherapy

Following ancient trade-routes

Like neural pathways in the brain,

Accompanied by electric violin. 

 

 

                        7

 

Journeying home:

Morning, coming over the pass toward Larnaca;

The sea not wine-dark

But glowing molten, golden chryso

Like fire pyro.

 

Landing in Athens,

White buildings, red earth, sparse grass

Like an ancient California, my home,

Glowing in the sun.

 

Returning, first Athens, then Frankfurt:

Modern Greece appears to be

The route for refugees.

I am subjected to multiple additional passport checks:

Police check me first coming off the plane

Then again at the gate for my flight to Glasgow.

 

Soon we will all be refugees,

But where will there be for us

To take refuge

If the world is ruined

By war and climate change?

 

 

                        8

 

Telos:

On this journey through

These ancient places

Blue skies rhyme with my time

Growing up in California,

The place I will soon return to.

 

As a teacher, I felt myself set free

In these places,

Muse-struck, not heedless but

Present in each moment.

 

Not far from the end of my life:

Who knows how much time

Between now and then?

 

But in the meantime

Each day is a gift:

I’m happy just to touch these lives,

And to be touched by them,

As if doing just this

Was the true meaning of my life.

 

                                    -Robert Elliott, 31 Oct – 7 Nov 2022, Athens-Nicosia-Glasgow

 

Stepping Down and Moving Forward

Entry for 31 Oct 2021:

  

Today my 15-year position as professor of counselling at the University of Strathclyde comes to an end.  I’ve been tailing off for several years now, a slow wind-down.  First I went from 5 days a week, actually more than full time, to 3 days per week, but distributed in a feast or famine kind of way: a month full time while I was in Scotland, alternating with a month in California, notionally working one day per week in Zoom meetings with colleagues and students. That worked well and produced some important writing projects.  However, it fell apart went the pandemic started, stranding us more or less by choice in Scotland full-time.  After that, a year ago, I cut back to two days week, planning to fully retire on this date.

 

However, I’m not going anywhere right away!  Instead, what happened was the two year EmpoweringEFT@EU project, funded by an EU Erasmus Plus grant. This was developed by Carla Cunha and colleagues at the University of Maia in Portugal, during the early days of the pandemic last year, as an initiative to develop training for EFT supervisors and trainers.  Carla gathered a collection of us, including Laco Timulak (Ireland), Lars Auszra & Imke Hermann (Germany), Rafa Jadar (Spain), and Joao Salgado (Portugal).  Most of us (myself included) were quite surprised when it actually got funded, and I found myself suddenly responsible (with various colleagues) for two of its key pieces, essentially curricula for training (a) EFT supervisors and (b) EFT trainers. The result is that I’ll be continuing to work one day per week for the next year for the University, supported by the Erasmus plus grant in an associate researcher position.

 

I’m actually very pleased to have this additional transition period.  It’s a fun project, which is producing quite a nice and useful framework for training EFT supervisors and trainers. We were slow starting, because we first had to develop a competence framework for EFT therapists as a basis for the frameworks for EFT supervisors and trainers. The supervisor framework is also almost finished, and we are making good progress on the trainer framework.

 

So this seems like a good time to do some more blog entries.