A blind rider on the back of an elephant

June 2009

It's taken me six months to throw off the creative block. Which may seem like a long time, but when you consider I was carrying it in one form or another every day of my life before that, it's a worthwhile investment.

Most blocks are more complex than simply the ego doesn’t want to do it and the Self does. Because they inform one another in a cybernetic loop. Buried defeatist beliefs surface in consciousness through dreams and whilst awake. If you fail to recognise the warning, if you read it as a judgement rather than a message, you end up selftalking deafeat – I can’t do this. I can’t do anything. This mantra in turn strengthens the unconscious lack of belief. Over the last months many of those failure beliefs have been brought into the light of day and transformed. My rapport with the unconscious part of myself has strengthened, and the unconscious Self itself has strengthened and shed many of the elements of defeat. So the ‘final task’, is for the ego to do its simple job of setting and communicating an intention, and then to get out of the way, while the unconscious mind, more powerful, gets on with performing the task.

If we don't value the unconscious, if we don't seek to cultivate a relationship with it, then we do not know who or what we are. The man who believes that the conscious mind is the whole (or only significant/functional part) of his psyche is like a blind rider on the back of an elephant wondering why the ground keeps moving.

I guess the fundamental idea in the analytical psychology of Carl Jung is that throughout time and place human beings have shared a relationship with a variety of images which the mind produces spontaneously for a particular purpose. And that purpose is to allow men and women to lead fuller emotional lives (by bringing the ‘modern’ and uniquely human ego back into balance with the primeval instinctive mind). The unconscious mind is constantly communicating with consciousness (through dreams etc) to remind us of how to live that fuller life.

The same image occurs everywhere in stories. The virgin birth, Christ's resurrection, Jonah and the Whale, Little Red Riding Hood in the belly of the wolf. Also in that familiar dream where you find yourself in a constricted space (there is always someone about to get squashed in Hollywood...only to escape death at the last possible moment).

Killing Me Softly

I've been aware that for the majority of people reading this (there are about 50 'following' on facebook), few will have read more than a handful of posts, and fewer will be familiar with the approach I’ve been using.
I have been soldiering on, putting out of mind the suspicion that posting it online was a futile exercise. Writing a blog has definitely added some thrust to the self-coaching process, but I half suspected that writing it and leaving it in 'My Documents' might be just as useful. Several times I considered quitting because I thought, 'Why expose yourself?’
And yet I heard from one woman (songwriter and performer) who had read the whole thing, tens of thousands of navel-gazing words – and told me that more than once she felt she was reading her own thoughts. Tiu became a friend. There was an inexplicable twist of serendipity when I met Tiu’s best friend at the venue on the night of my first performance...but I’ll save that one for my autobiography.

Back to Life

May 2009

The heart has its reasons. I was right about that.

When I started writing this blog I didn't really understand the motivation for doing it. I just felt that it was something I needed to do.
I thought there was perhaps a way I could learn to want to do music the way a lot of other people do. They are in bands, they play gigs, they have a laugh, they get on with it - a bit like a normal job, a bit more fun and a lot less money. And you can always get drunk after the gig.
But this went deeper. The purpose of writing this blog, as it turns out, for me as a songwriter, as a human being, was to deliver me from myself.
By paying attention to dreams, building a rapport with the unconscious, and getting the help of a coach and a therapist, I cleared a lot of muck out of my way. Not only am I singing and playing again, but I’m leading a cleaner, happier life. And because my mind and perceptions are no longer clouded by self-questioning and doubt, what I would hesitatingly call the mystical silence at the heart of life, has again been revealed to me. That is something that I haven’t seen or felt really for a couple of years. It’s nice to have it back. In the decade and a half I lived with severe depression, these extended moments of altered consciousness - total freedom - would descend upon me from time to time. They gave me hope that there was a possibility of living a better life. But I also interpreted them as a possible symptom of a worse madness to come. Why did the world around me suddenly ‘burst off the page’ into full radiant life? And how tantalising that it would inevitably recede again into the shadow – after a morning or a half hour or even a few seconds.

Of course, there is more to come. I have to be honest and ask the question, “How connected with my 'higher purpose' will I feel after 12 months of playing in pubs when the punters' conversations are louder than the PA?”
But right now I feel like something so fundamental has changed that all that stuff is irrelevant. The only barrier I ever faced was within myself. I am home free.

There's a Harmony in my He-e-e-ead

I love harmony. My earliest memories of music were tv themes and ad jingles with voices in harmony. I can see harmony - different coloured strands moving together through the air. If you have a good ear, each part maintains its own integrity, and slots into its own groove in space. Two part harmony is a dance of two energies, each one holding the other in space, but to the listener they can sound as one thing. And if you are inside it, singing, you give yourself to it, you trust the other voice to hold you and the other trusts you to hold them and thereby, both are released. As Franz Kafka said, "When you blend your voice with others, it is like being taken on a hook." Crikey. I never knew. Harmony is love.

Have A Talk With God

28th April 2009

In the economy of heaven there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
James Joyce, Ulysses


I arrive at our next meeting and sit down on the leather sofa. After hellos Blue invites me to move to the seat where the remaining Part in the psychodrama is. I can’t, because the sofa is back to the wall, and I have the strong sensation that this Part is way behind me somewhere. So we start again, and I sit on a chair in the middle of the room having placed another chair on the back wall. It’s still not quite right because the room isn’t big enough - I can’t go far enough back from my original position. I figure we better get on with it and move to the chair against the wall. This time I walk consciously, the movement is not outside of my control as it was last time, and I’m concerned that I’m not really in the right frame of mind for this exercise today. I guess the unconscious mind is miffed that we don’t have the acres of space we need to do this properly and therefore isn’t joining in.

I needn’t have worried. A strange thing happens immediately I sit down. My eyes close spontaneously and in my mind’s eye I can see a very clear image of Danny (myself) sat on a chair with his back to me. But this Danny is about a mile away from where I am now sitting (in body if not in spirit). And we’re not really in this room anymore. There is a great expanse of floor space. And the atmosphere has changed. Like we’re in a cathedral. There is a quiet ambience, soft white light. And I’m in a trance.

The Part’s name, of course, is God.

“How do you relate to these other Parts?” (Brian, Miranda, the Devil, Danny's consciousness)
“I am them all. They are all in me. However, these Parts are a lot closer to Danny’s awareness than I am.”
God tells Blue that Danny is miles away from where God is sitting. The conversation continues for a minute or two, but I cannot remember what was said. I wasn’t conscious as it happened.

Then the time arrives. Still with my eyes closed, I spontaneously zoom right in to the space where Danny and his parts are (and just as it’s happening, Blue is suggesting the same thing). Now, God is right behind Danny, and God’s aura subsumes the little band of mind-characters. It’s quite a moment, this zooming in: it happens in a fraction of a second and there are zoom lines as everything whizzes past God’s head.

As I come round, I’m in a daze. Something has changed. It’s in the top two most significant events of my life to date – the other being the birth of my daughter.
All this time thinking there was something that needed fixing with me, and all the time spent reading the psychology and self-help books in the effort to fix myself (time where I couldn’t actually get on with living) – all of that, dissolved in a moment.

In the following days I think about it from the perspective of the Jungian model of mind. This ‘God’ part is really what Jung called the Self, the totality of who I am. And this Self zooming in to encompass the parts of my psyche: my conscious awareness, Brian the unimpressive masculinity, Miranda the brooding anima and ‘The Devil’, my shadow. This zooming in represented a final coming into awareness of a Self that had been distantly unconscious – the powers, potentials and peculiarities. All of the things that go to make the enigma that is a human being.

This voice dialoguing exercise may have enabled a major step forward in an accelerated individuation process (according to Wikipedia: Individuation is the process of transforming one’s psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into conscious. Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically.)

Or from a different angle: Self-acceptance. Nothing more, nothing less.

Devil in Disguise

I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space

Crazy (Burton/Callaway/Reverberi/Reverberi)


24th April 2009

A few days later, in a self-induced trance, I have a conversation with this Devil. What does he mean when he says he wants to kill me? Because if he really wanted to kill me, surely he would have succeeded by now.
It turns out that he is the repressed desire for an end to suffering. He wanted an end to the pain of rejection or separation I felt earlier in life. And what did he want by wanting that? Just peace. So this devil is not so bad after all. Like any misbehaving child, like any dysfunctional adult he just wanted to feel good – but he went about it by the wrong means. He indulged in self-destructive behaviours because they bring about an end to suffering temporarily. And that was the most he could hope for.
But also, this Devil is at the core of that total disintegration of self which I have experienced several times – the giving up, the letting it all go to shit. The closing down of the connection or the engagement with life. A living death. Weeks or months where I didn’t go to work – I just sat in the garden or the park drinking tea and chain-smoking. My life just stopped. I ceased to exist. The death wish. The frozen kingdom. The wasteland. La la la.

Up Jumped The Devil

April 2009

With the crouching gait of a theatrical Jew, I labour through treacle to take my seat in the fourth chair. I feel a great weight pressing on my body from every direction. Reminiscent of a punishment in one of Dante’s Circles of Hell.
“What can I call you?” says Blue.
“The Devil,” I deadpan.
“At what age did you come into Danny’s life?”
My head jerks to the side seven times.
“Age seven.”
“What was your purpose then?”
“To kill him.”
“Why?”
“Because he wasn’t good enough.” This Devil seems wholly malevolent. It’s a little disturbing that he has apparently been living in me all these years.
“What needs to change with Danny? What would make him good enough?”
“He is good enough. That was all from other people. I don’t believe that anymore.”
“But you still want to kill him?”
“Well, we all get into these habits.” Laughter.
“What do you think of Brian?”
“He doesn’t come into it.”
“Are you in charge?”
“No. But I’m pretty powerful.”
“You’re more interested in Miranda than Brian?”
“She is to do with the senses. She can be subverted. Brian is only dealing with structure, with logic.”
“How does it feel to be heard?”
“It makes a change. We did that dancing around with Robert Dilts last year [a course where participants attempted to defeat personal demons through NLP exploration and meditative centring in the body]. They identified the symptom of my influence: the wibbling, the ineffectuality. But they didn’t go deep enough – they didn’t get to me.”
“Are you responsible for Danny’s spontaneous movement?”
“No.”

I return to the first chair.
“Where is the part responsible for the music, where is the creative genius in relation to you now?” asks Blue.
“I feel like I don’t want to move, like it’s right here in my conscious awareness.”
“That’s good, then. You have this drive to enlightenment: more than most men, more than most people. Who’s responsible for that?”
“Brian is the organiser, the goal-setter. But it’s not him.”
“I get the sense there’s another part involved in this?”
“Yes. It’s way out behind me. It’s the Self. It’s god.”

We’re out of time for today. Blue says that the NLP approach would seek to integrate these parts. Get them working together. But he suggests we allow them just to be in my awareness until next we meet. So I leave the Vestry Hall and wander around Wandsworth for a bit. For several days I feel a bit like I’ve been blown apart. It’s not altogether unpleasant.