Indefinite Leave to Remain

5 December 2011:

Out of blue this morning, our visa renewal came in an anonymous-looking envelope, which included our passports with the new visas saying that we have Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK.  Actually, there is nothing indefinite about it: We are "settled", and can stay as long as we want, which in our case is another 4.5 years.   

My first reaction was shock, because I wasn't expecting it this soon and had totally given up on hearing back before Christmas.  For months, we had been mentally preparing ourselves for a longer wait and even to be turned down and deported.  We had given up on travelling to the US for the holidays, and had instead arranged for Kenneth to come visit us here.  I’d started to worry about a February training I am scheduled to run in Belgium.  Suddenly, all the familiar waiting was gone, vanished, leaving a kind of vacuum of missing expectancy.  

It was only after the initial shock had worn off and we had read through all the paperwork that I began to feel an easing in my body, relief from an implicit tension that I’d been carrying for many months, really almost a year, at the uncertainty about our future. 

Surprisingly, I am also left with a sense of being a bit daunted by having my life, all these months in limbo, hanging suspended, suddenly shift into gear and move forward again.  But where?  How?  What’s next?  What first?  What to do with this unexpected Christmas gift of More Time, a reprieve?

Big Chapter Done: Getting my life back…

Entry for 3 December 2011:

I’ve been working on a huge review chapter on research on experiential psychotherapies for the past 6 months, and finally finished it late last night, three months late.  I don’t know if the editor will take it that late, but for now I’m glad to have my life back.  At times, I despaired we’d ever finish it, but fortunately my co-authors came through with their bits, and that gave me the impetus to push on, if only for the sake of the effort they’d put in. 

Toward the end, as the chapter got more and more overdue, it gradually took over more and more bits of my life, crowding out things like writing blog entries, running, Saturday Adventures, watching television, going to the folk club, doing email, church, taking a reasonable time to eat breakfast in the morning, reading more than a few pages of science fiction a day, grocery shopping, and so on.  At times it felt like having some sort of life-sapping illness.  I rarely cheated on my sleep; and I continued to make adequate space for my clients, and did my teaching.  However, my PhD and MSc students have been neglected (apologies to them!), and at the end Diane had help me check the 300 references.

Yesterday, as the End come into view, I became elated at the prospect of getting my life back.  Finally, about 11pm I sent it off to the editor and my co-authors.  Diane and I celebrated by watching an episode of The Mentalist and, just for good measure, The Big Bang Theory.  Then, this morning I went for a run, we had a leisurely brunch, and then went on our first Saturday Adventure in a month:

We walked over to see the newly installed Antonine Wall exhibit at the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow.  For last 300 years they have been collecting the old Roman mile markers, from the road built by the Roman legions about 140 C.E. just behind the Antonine Wall, which spans central Scotland, from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde.  In addition to almost all of the mile markers, they’ve got grave stones, altar stones, lots of statues of the Goddesses Fortuna (Fortune or Luck) and Victoria (Winged Victory), and quite a few bas relief cartoon-like depictions of bad things happening to celtic warriors and prisoners.  There are even a couple of statues of Silenus, Bacchus’ drinking companion.  There are also lots of roman household artifacts found in the Glasgow area, some quite fascinating, like a cheese press and accompanying lead weight, or fake tin denarius coins for a wishing well.  Afterwards, we made a quick visit to the nearby Hunterian Art Museum, which I think is underrated due to the proximity of the Kelvingrove, but has its pleasures.  Finally, we walked along Byres Road, and then home again.  Saturday Adventures were back! 

Riding a Coo through the Scottish Highlands

The next day after I posted The Sunset Run poem blog entry, I was trying to tell a couple of my Scottish colleagues about it.  I said, "After I got home, I went for a run and then wrote a haiku."
"What?, they said.
I repeated, "I wrote a haiku."
"Huh?"
"You know, a Japanese poem."
"Oh!," they said.  "You mean, a 'hai-queue?'  We thought you were riding on top of a high coo [=cow]!" 

I was left with an image of the famous picture of Buddha riding the ox...

Sunset Run

Entry for 18 October 2011:

Another haiku form poem:

The light goes away

losing five minutes each day:

Late sun still glints bright.

Hard rains these last days:

Weir booms below aqueduct,

fox lopes home at dusk.

Too much on right now:

Still, good day’s training, finished

paper, hard run help.

Reflections on 9/11: Learning from Mona

Entry for 11 September 2011:

Our friend Becky, from Trinity Episcopal Church, our old church back in Toledo, Ohio, asked me recently if I’d be willing to write a bit for their newsletter about how the events on 11 September 2001 had affected me since.  Here is a slightly revised version of what I wrote:

In the months after 9/11, I happened to be working with Mona, a devout Muslim postgraduate student of mine, and had several long conversations with her about the double victimization she and her fellow Muslims experienced after 9/11:  First as an American and thus an object of the attacks; but second and more importantly because of the discrimination she personally and other Muslims experienced after 9/11, including constant monitoring of her local mosque by federal agents.  As a result, I learned more about Islam and took every opportunity to defend Muslims from unfair treatment and prejudice.  She has since completed her PhD and now works at a university in Cairo, where she has become involved in the largely peaceful revolution that has been happening in Egypt.  My experience with Mona has since helped me to work more compassionately with other Islamic postgraduate students here in Scotland. 

I thought of this again this morning, on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, but also because the lessons today focused on forgiveness. (For example, at the end of Genesis, Joseph forgives his brothers for having sold him into slavery.)  And I found myself wondering again how different things might have been if our main response to the 9/11 attacks had been to seek understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness rather than revenge…

Gareth Williams on Possible Relationships between EFT and Buddhism

Entry for 4 September 2011:

This year’s Glasgow EFT Level 1 training was marked by more theoretical diversity than ever before, which made for some interesting dialogues with colleagues from psychodynamic, systemic-couples, … and Buddhist perspectives.  One of this year’s participants, Gareth Williams, brought a particularly Buddhist perspective to the EFT training.  After the training workshop, at my invitation, he wrote the following about possible connections between EFT and Buddhism.  He’s given his permission for me to publish these comments here.  (Thanks, Gareth!)

First, here’s a bit about Gareth: Following 2 years as a full-time volunteer at Lothlorien therapeutic community in Scotland, Gareth trained in person-centred counselling at Strathclyde University with Dave Mearns. Since then he has undertaken a long-term study of Arnold Mindell's process-oriented psychology; a Masters degree at the University of Manchester, where his thesis focused on the role of creativity in transformation and healing; a certificate in mindfulness at Samye Ling; and a certificate in supervision at Tenemos.  

Gareth is currently based on the border of Staffordshire and Cheshire, where he works as a senior counsellor with North Staffs Mind. Also in the process of establishing himself as a freelance therapist and supervisor, he has just contributed to a forthcoming book on counselling psychology. He has special interests in creativity, anxiety, mindfulness, ecotherapy, working with young people and their families, and common factors in therapy. 

Hi Robert.

Here's some gathered thoughts on how EFT fits into a Buddhist mindfulness context. My understanding is of course limited and there are many schools of Buddhism with subtle and not so subtle differences. So this is a personal Buddhist-inspired epistemological take on EFT.

EFT can help us understand the way our mind constructs experience. Not the truth or anything like that, simply our experience of life.

(And in the process of exploration we no doubt contribute to the construction.)

From a Buddhist perspective, life and who we are cannot be fully summed up ever. It’s all part of an ongoing life process.

Shantideva, Buddhist saint from a few hundred years back, said we should regard all phenomena as rainbow-like. EFT can help us appreciate the various interactive components of our experience.

Buddhist therapist John Welwood (2000) (Gendlin was one of his mentors) points out how we can get tangled up in our reactions to our emotions (secondary emotions in EFT). Rather than letting a feeling guide us and letting it come and go, there can be a judging and resisting of it. A whole storyline can be associated with it, for example, "only failures feel down like this, I must be a failure."

He goes on to explain how psychotherapy can support people to untangle the experience and understand the complex information within an overall lived experience.

What comes to mind is mindfulness teacher Rob Nairn citing a Tibetan master, Tai Situpa, as saying that if you let it go/be/play out, without resisting or adding, any thought/feeling will last at most 2 to 3 minutes. If you worry or avoid or resist you tend to suppress and inadvertantly prolong the experience.  [Note: In EFT we like to point out that adaptive emotions are by nature brief: they emerge to help us read, understand and respond appropriately to a particular immediate situation, then they recede in order to make space for the next emotion.] 

EFT supports people to allow their experiences.

In mindfulness practice, the meditation support (breath, sound, body sensations) is an anchor, a regulator, but ideally like a feather on a stream. Not pushing anything away, letting it all be. And mindfulness is awareness and compassion/kindness. When practiced skilfully, whatever emotion/experience/thought arises is met with kindness. One teaching is to soften around it. This ties in with Greenberg (2004) on transformation of emotion through contact between difficult scheme and adaptive scheme.

Rob Nairn teaches his students the importance of not "parking off" their difficult feelings. Compassion training really emphasises making friends with our pain. Rob draws on Jung's notion of "complexes" - split off parts - and how healing it can be to meet these with mindfulness. Allowing for some kind of integration and transformation.

Compassionate awareness itself brings change. There is not an agenda of how it should be in the inner world. Capacity for awareness and kindness is regarded as inherent. It’s often called Buddha Nature.

Tara Brach is a popular mindfulness teacher. She wrote Radical Acceptance and teaches a method called RAIN: Recognise, Allow, Inquire and Non-identify. The inquiry part of the practice seems very akin to bringing awareness to the different components of the emotion scheme - body, associations, images, etc.

That's probably more than enough for now. Any questions and/or feedback will be enthusiastically received!

All the best and thanks for a great training course. Gareth

Gareth Williams
Human (mostly)

Strontium Anniversary

Entry for 18 August 2011:

We celebrated our 38^th Wedding Anniversary today. Thirty-eight is the atomic number of Strontium, an alkali metal earth element. Interestingly, this is the first time we have been in Glasgow for our anniversary, and it turns out that Strontium is named after the small Scottish village of Strontian in the West Highlands, north of us, source of the minerals from which it was first isolated 200 years ago.

Strontium is silvery gray in color and highly reactive in air or water. It is a fairly common element, and has had many uses over the past 150 years, including sugar beet production, old fashioned cathode ray tube glass, engine alloy metal, and medical devices. It also used in toothpaste and may – or may not – be useful for treating osteoporosis.

Thus, Strontium seems to us to be a very appropriate element for symbolizing our 38^th anniversary. First, it is a Scottish element, and here we are, celebrating its number in Scotland. Second, like us, it is not an ancient element, but has nevertheless been around for a while. Third, it is silvery in color, and so are we (our hair anyway…). Fourth, it has had many different uses over time, and these uses continue to evolve, just as we continue to evolve.