Glimmers & Glows: Recent Episodes
Steve
There are times in our lives as nervy human creatures, that we experience glimmers and glows: a sense of being at "home" in ourselves and the world.
In this state we feel safe and connected, calm and grounded.
Words, music, art, nature takes us there; an encounter with another living being, but also specific emotion-regulation practices.
This is a collection of my glimmers and glows, as well as those I have collected from others.
If you would like to share with me your glimmers&glows, or any other thoughts, please send a message to glimmersandglows@gmail.com.
When we are suffering with thoughts, feelings, body sensations, experiences, or memories, it can sometimes be useful to chart the journey of others who have struggled in similar ways.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who I came to quite late in my reading life, never having studied philosophy as a subject, experiencing it for the most part a somewhat intimidating domain, struggled with health issues, both physical and mental, for much of the time he was on this planet.
If he were alive today, I suspect he might have been diagnosed with having fibromyalgia, or another issue that highly sensitive folk often struggle with.
What I find inspiring about his life is that he seems to have landed on a way, at least for a while, of finding value, meaning, and joy at the same time as being ill on a constant basis.
I think this short chapter from the novelist Stefan Zweig’s recent book on Nietzsche gets to the heart of a paradox that often arises in psychotherapy, but also in our lives in general: how to “love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it,” as the poet Ellen Bass laments, “and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands”?
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Full text of this episode can be found here.
Please feel free to get in touch either by email or telephone (07804197605) if anything in this piece has spoken to you in some way, or to book a consultation.
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So I finally got around to reading The Power of Now.
I had studiously avoided the text since it’s publication in 1999. I think because a part of me had made certain assumptions about this book.
Let’s call that part of my mind The Intellectual Snob. The Intellectual Snob had assumed that Eck’s bestseller was nothing but minestrone soup. How could it be a “spiritual classic” in such a short time? Who cared if Oprah Herself was singing its praises – no, this phenomenon was nothing but excessively reheated minestrone soup. End of.
And that’s not good soup by anyone’s standards, that’s soup made up of spiritual bits and bobs, cherry-picked from Eastern and Western traditions, strung together with a snappy, bumper-sticker slogan and delivered in my audiobook format through Mr T’s faintly creepy vocalizations.
THE POWER OF NOW?
Yadda yadda, yawn.
(Forgive the tone of my Intellectual Snob, but that’s how they sound.)
CONTINUE READING: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/therapy/the-power-of-now-therapy/
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For many, many years now, I have signed off all my emails to the people I care about with the word “warmly”.
I can’t remember where I picked this up from. It was not my own invention. But at some point, I must have received an email from someone with a “warmly” preceding their name, and felt with great pleasure some of genuine warmth baked into the salutation. Being a human monkey, in true monkey-see, monkey-do spirit, I wanted to pass these warm vibes on! And hopefully I have.
For me, “warmly”, is akin to saying “with love”. And why would we not end all our communications in that way, including our professional ones? I don’t know. But I do know that warmly has worked well for me, rather than the more common (and to my ears, less warm and loving) sign-offs such as “cheers” or “best” or “regards”, as well as the many different forms of “yours” (sincerely, faithfully, truly etc.).
The problems with off-the-peg sign-offs though, including “warmly”, is that through usage they somehow lose their presence and emotional charge, becoming a kind of empty placeholder, a nothing.
So just for fun, I thought I might come up with a few new sign-offs, starting with this one: SPLGE-R.
Continue reading: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/my-splge-r-sign-off-explained/
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Therapists, sex work, solipsism.
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Humans as plants - on a 12/12 phasic light-cycle.
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John Cage. Silence.
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The solace of perspective. “Burning” CDs in the 90s.
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Are you my ideal listener? Am I your ideal speaker? Or maybe it's the other way around?
If you ever find out: glimmersandglows@gmail.com
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I admire a very simple swing. I then swing on the very simple swing and get more than I bargained for.
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- A man of the house of Levi went and took a daughter of Levi as his wife. 2 The woman conceived, and bore a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. 3 When she could no longer hide him, she took a papyrus basket for him, and coated it with tar and with pitch. She put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river's bank. 4 His sister stood far off, to see what would be done to him.
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An exchange with my father about our ancestors and the benefits (or not) of dwelling on the past in this way.
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Psychotherapist, artist, and wilderness guide, Cara Lai talking on this theme for the Ten Percent Happier podcast: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/cara-lai-265
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“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there — on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . .
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
CARL SAGAN
(To watch Carl Sagan's speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgQ1PtkZvGU)
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If you'd like to listen to the whole discussion between Ezra Klein and Nicholas Carr (I'd very much recommend it, a fascinating chat) that you can do that here: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klein-show-the-shallows-twitter-facebook-attention-deep-reading-thinking
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The solace of feeling the Earth beneath our feet without any shoes, socks or stockings getting in the way of that contact.
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GLIMMERS: those moments or micro-moments when we feel safe and connected, calm and social (Deb Dana).
GLOWS: a slightly extended version of the above :-)
For more Deb & her wonderful work on emotion regulation through the lens of polyvagal theory: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Befriending-Your-Nervous-System-Audiobook/168364462X?qid=1593863155&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=VBBG3D7MYM5NJH70QCAT
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