Goodbye Yellow Brick Road?

A blind rider on the back of an elephant

2010-07-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-24T17:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-12-05T15:49:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T09:04:00.001-07:00

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.

Everybody's Talkin' At Me

2009-10-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

April 2009

So I book another session with Blue Marsden. I’ve complained of feeling split, of having parts of myself that seem out of balance. Blue suggests an exercise whereby the split-off parts can communicate with one another. He sets out four chairs. One is for my present awareness. One is for the unconscious male aspect. One is for the unconscious female aspect. One is for...???

I start out in the chair for present awareness. Blue invites me to move to the chair where the male aspect is. I do this, but there is no volition in it. My body feels like it’s being pulled the few steps to the other chair, and I sit heavily, slumping.

Blue asks the guy what is his name?
“Brian,” I reply. I chuckle. Where did that come from? I think of Bryan S. Lane a profile name I used on a social networking website some years ago. There is a street in my hometown called Bryans Lane. And Richard Briers, the actor who has played a number of ineffectual men in British sitcoms. And Brian Wilson – a musical genius with his own tale to tell of psychic dismemberment (I’ve loved the Beach Boys music for many years).
From the conversation (between Blue and Brian) which follows, we learn the following: Brian deals with order and discipline, the structure of my life out in the world – money, work, responsibility, polite society. And these are things which have always been in disarray with me, totally mismanaged throughout my life. Why? What has Brian got to say for himself?
“I get overlooked. It would make a big difference to our progress if I was given a little more respect. My role is an important one. All this transcendental experience and feeling good is all well and good, but without balance and good housekeeping...it doesn’t convert into anything concrete in the real world. The search for happiness is always undermined, because the practicalities aren’t in place.”
Brian is ineffectual, he has no masculine power. He never matured. I later find out (via the head nod) that Brian ceased to develop at the age of seven. This explains a lot. My dealings in the world have been governed by a seven year old boy. I wonder if any of my readers can relate to the constistent feeling I’ve had of being a child amongst grown-ups? No mortgage, no car, and bouncing between the dole and one awful job after another.
Give me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man, indeed.

Blue invites me to shake off Brian and move to the place where I feel the female aspect is sitting. Again, the body moves spontaneously, past Blue to the other side of the room. My hand automatically slides the seat further out.
“What would you like me to call you?” says Blue.
“Miranda,” I reply. And I laugh. I find out later that the name Miranda is derived from Latin "Mirare". Miranda is (according to www.thecapras.org/mcapra/miranda/derivation.html ) "worthy of admiration", "something to admire", "a woman who must be admired".

“When did you come into Danny’s life, Miranda?”
“I’ve always been there. I’m his soul. He has a feminine soul.”
“How do you feel about Brian?”
“I wish he would do more...you know, around the house (laughter). I feel a vague sort of animosity towards him.”
“How do you feel about the way things are with Danny?”
“It’s a bit messy. I generate all these behaviours [the addictive patterns that have been causing Danny distress] to connect with feeling, with connection, with love. But there is no discipline, because Brian doesn’t show up. He’s supposed to direct this energy toward the right things.”

Blue invites me to shake off Miranda, and to take my place in the last chair. Who’s sitting there?

Finish What Ya Started

2009-10-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

As I haven't posted for some months, I imagine no-one will be reading this anymore. And that's quite apt, really, as we shall see.
'Finishing' the blog has been on the back of my mind since I last posted. However, I've been really busy, and haven't found the time. A lot has happened. And in reading back through some of the previous posts, I'm struggling to recognise myself there. Things have changed.
So what have I been up to? Well, I now have two jobs; I've played numerous gigs including a couple of community type festivals (in Northumberland and Birmingham), performed with my friend Nathan on French Horn; and I'm rehearsing a band which currently has five or six members.

Now, I will endeavour to tell the rest of 'the story' - to bring this tale to its conclusion. The remaining posts will be about the past, but I'll write them in present tense. And I'll be working as quickly as is humanly possible - so no-one, please forgive me if the standard of prose drops a little.
I want to move on to the next project (beyond the music). I'll write a novel during the month of November.

Pour Some Sugar On Me

2009-07-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve found something of a dichotomy between the croon and falsetto aspects of my voice. As I find more power in the ‘chest’ voice, the ‘head’ voice by contrast seems a little weak, and so the crossing from the lower notes to the higher is not as convincing as I’d like. I’ve been thinking of this as some kind of a physical metaphor for where I am psychically right now. A few posts ago I was talking about feeling an imbalance between my masculine and feminine ‘sides’. And I still need to deal with this.

There are a few reasons why I think there is some kind of imbalance.

First, I have a feeling of estrangement from ‘something’, some part of myself. I think this estrangement is the cause of some escalating shadowy behaviours (sex, drugs, shopping and biscuits). Attempts to salve that feeling of lack or loss?

Second, I dreamed that a young woman whom I wasn't sexually attracted to was trying to call me, but my phone has no signal (15 missed calls), and then when it finally rings I 'reject the call', because I haven't got used to the controls of my new phone yet. Couple of nights later, this highly satirical dream: as I kissed a woman (without authentic feeling), a shadowy fellow in the rafters poured icing sugar over us. I then shouted at her just to see what the shadow guy would do this time. He poured lemon juice on us. Interpretation: that I need to make contact with this woman, but I’m going about it in the wrong ways. I’m schmoozing her (pouring sugar on her), and if I don’t get what I want, I’ll give her sour lemon. I need to find the middle way.
According to Carl Jung, this ‘she’ is really a representation of my ‘soul’. Jung called this dream woman the ‘anima’. She is the unconscious female personality (‘woman within’) that influences a man’s relationships (through projection) and appears personified in his dreams.
So the dream appears to suggest that I am behaving in an unbalanced way with regards to my relationship with my Self. On a basic level, I do not love myself. It’s that typical emotional rollercoaster of people with suspect self-esteem: in one breath they think they are amazing genius songwriters (sugar) and in the next, they cannot even look at themselves in the mirror (lemon).

Looking for more clarity on this I remembered Christopher Booker’s book ‘The Seven Basic Plots’: a dry and sometimes chauvinistic treatise on the true purpose of storytelling. Or an arduous (709 page) retelling of the Hero with A Thousand Faces. But there is an interesting section where Booker delineates the various possible imbalances between the archetypes in an individual psyche, and how these might manifest in the story (in life). It seems that I am ‘in thrall to the dark feminine, who

works through a superificial show of feminine qualities, by appearing to feel and to care. She gets her way by guile, seduction, placation, deception. She disguises her true predatory intent beneath a pretence that she is serving the hero’s best interests, like Circe or the Witch in Hansel and Gretel who offers the children gingerbread as a lure. It is only later that her real nature and purpose emerges, that she really wishes to imprison or devour her victims. The Dark Mother/Temptress promises the hero ease and self-gratification, that he does not have to make any effort or show firmness, that there is a short cut to becoming a man. She seeks to flatter his vanity or to gratify his physical appetites – for food, sex, comfort, relaxation...And here, in order to resist her wiles, the hero’s task is to show himself as fully masculine. He has to show strength, judgement, the ability to discriminate...The purpose of the ‘dark feminine’ is to unman him, to make him weak and dependent, to turn him into ‘the boy who cannot grow up’...it requires his to summon up all his masculine strength, will-power and self reliance, as Odysseus does when he finally manages to break free from the enchantments of Calypso.

Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots (pages 280-1)

So, it seems that I need to connect with some male energy: in order to free the damsel imprisoned within the tower, I’ve got to build a ladder, and in order to build a ladder, I’ve got to learn woodwork. To corroborate this I ask for a 'life-centring communication' from the Self. I get an erupting volcano and then a huge square trench with equal diameter to the volcano. Interestingly, the phallus image came first (excuse pun). I ask if these images are meant to suggest that my work now is balancing this male and female stuff and get a definite yes.

A little less conversation, a little more action please

2009-07-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

"Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious for the outcome of his deeds, but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the Living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death."
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

I’ve been onstage again. I worried that, after all this highflown prose, the myth of a west midlands boy unfolding in my mind whilst I went about my ordinary business in London E8, that the actual playing songs to a real live audience of Hackney people completely oblivious to the backstory, (and the one friend whom I invited, alas for him, not oblivious to the backstory) might come as an anticlimax. How will this Postmodern Prometheus fare on Clapton’s Murder Mile?

I needn’t have worried. It went really well. I was well received by an attentive audience and likened (by different people who came to offer me their encouragement after I came offstage) to Roy Orbison and Sparks...

I haven’t come up with a stage name as yet, so I invited Neville (the promoter) to just make up a name as he introduced me on the mic. I should explain that I made the inspired decision to wear warpaint and a novelty feather headdress and Neville, in turn, made the inspired decision to christen me “Pocahontas Murphy”. It was a nice moment when I began to sing and the audience realised I wasn’t a novelty act. It’s probably important to explain why I chose to grace the stage in costume. The truth is, I can’t remember the moment(s) I had the idea. But as I said much earlier, the heart has its reasons.

Time To Pretend

2009-07-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

...and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed away from the world.
George Russell, Candle of Vision

I’ve been going through this process over the last months, and it's felt like a game - a painful one at times, but a game. A bit unreal, a bit 'let's pretend', a bit like a dream. Was it leading anywhere, or was it going to go on forever, me writing it down as some kind of 'second life'? As long as I was writing it down, it would be as if something was actually happening.

Now, I've opened up this box and...it's happened. The jewel – my voice; the unobstructed urge to sing to an audience; the feeling that this is what I’m meant to do, and each part of me is plugging for it – the jewel is there, glaring up at me. And I'm like "Oops. Can't put that one back." Careful what you wish for.

And, Dear Reader, if you’ll allow me to get mystical for a moment: my day to day life has been changed for the better each step along the way (and significantly in these most recent steps). I’m finding the world itself to be a compatible lover. The world is beautiful. It shimmers. And I have the eyes again to see it. That is what evolution did – we grew as an organ within a body, we fit, it fits: nothing at all is wrong.

What You Do To Me

2009-07-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Aware of the danger I did a Betty (Erickson, self-hypnosis induction) to request I rest ‘at the core of my being’ through the night.
Shortly before waking, I dreamed a very similar dream to last time I requested this of Betty. Similar, yet with a vital distinction: this time, I was not repulsed by my own shamefully deformed reflection, rather I was the subject of some mean comments from a small group of others. When I woke I checked that I had forgiven myself for the years of self-loathing. And I checked that I was free of the negative energies that had scuppered a good chunk of my youth. I got a clear nod for both questions.

Perhaps, at the core of my being is still this wounded, deformed demi-god. But he is now utterly divested of the emotional tones of guilt and shame, and the feeling of defeat.
And from that I deduce, this meaning: That is who I am and perhaps will never change. Rather than the source of my suffering, it is the monumental ego-wound that has led me finally to my release; it is also the lifeblood of my own creativity. And this notion of a wounded child, promised in childhood riches beyond measure and then cheated as he moves into adult life, is common to many. It is a truth that, to a greater or lesser degree, is true for every one of us (whether we admit it or not).

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

2009-07-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

Some of us were going somewhere. The other three chaps had motorbikes. I didn’t. We set off, and soon they were gone over the horizon. Clearly, on foot, I had no means to match them. So I turned back on the dusty road, the few paces back home.

Interpretation: Time to get on your bike.

Walking past Biddle Bros on Lower Clapton Road, I notice a poster for their Myspace or yours acoustic nights. I take down Neville’s phone number and call him (apologetically) at just gone 11pm.
I have my first ever gig in my post-Goodbye Yellow Brick Road? incarnation for next Tuesday at some time after 9pm.

The Ego Has Landed

2009-07-12T12:49:00.001-07:00

I am the child and this time it is the father who falls from a great height to his death. And my father is Robbie Williams and his face has all melted on impact. I wake with the child’s voice yelling, “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy,” it comes with me from the dream as an auditory hallucination into the waking world. A little unsettling.

Interpretation:
Robbie, bless him, represents (for me) that kind of performer who is utterly wrapped up in his public image. I was drawn back into this process by another performer, a TV presenter, an image of performance that I found so superficial and egocentric that I initially took the dream to mean that I should silence the part of me that urged toward the stage.
Then, after a period of feeling bereft, I reinterpreted the dream – it was a message that my beliefs about performance being nothing but egocentricity were a crucial part of what was stopping me from doing it.
Now, preparing to launch into a singing career which I believe is driven by a deeper centre than the ego, the performer in his showbiz guise has served his purpose and can be killed off. It represents a kind of context-specific ego-death (I hope). The pure motivation (represented by the archetypal child) remains.

How satisfying that the murder victim should be the multi-millionaire former member of Take That.

Perhaps this slaying of a superficial egoic father figure is also relevant following so closely in the wake of dealing with the mother aspect of my anima. Perhaps a more powerful man is readying himself to take the stage.

How Can There Be Tears?

2009-07-11T04:14:00.001-07:00

Wrote a song called ‘How Can There Be Tears?’ A platonic love song for my oldest male friend. The words are a work in progress, but I believe that this is some demonstration of my escape from anima-centric lyrical concerns.

Dude Looks Like a Lady

2009-07-11T04:05:00.000-07:00

In the Middle Ages, long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there are both male and female elements in all of us, it was said that 'every man carries a woman within himself.
C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

Woman is central to a man’s psychic life. According to Carl Jung, women in men’s dreams represent an accretion of a man’s inner ‘feminine’ qualities, whether these qualities are integrated into his conscious idea of himself, or not. A hidden individual made up of the genetic imprint of the opposite sex deep within the psyche, plus one’s early experiences of the parent of the opposite sex, plus the sum total of all of one’s relations with members of the opposite sex.

Remember the ‘new man’, “in touch with his feminine side”? The concept has a long heritage: God removed Adam’s rib in order to fashion Eve. Before man was man and woman was woman, man was both. As individuals we have and always had a hermaphroditic nature. And men experience what might conventionally be described as a maternal instinct. Eve was separated from Adam like a child is separated from its mother.

This image of woman (Jung named her the ‘anima’) appears throughout art and folklore (La Belle Dame sans Merci; Yoshimi battling the pink robots; Rapunzel in the tower etc).

I tell Blue Marsden that I believe I am ‘in touch with my feminine side’ – my day job for instance, is an exercise in compassion and connection with others. It comes naturally and I find it very rewarding. The flipside of this being that I’ve often felt out of touch with my masculine side – the qualities of discipline, confidence, purposiveness. I talk about feelings (did you spot that?), and apparently that is more a woman’s thing than a man’s.

Growing up I was a bit of a mummy’s boy, I guess. Perhaps I’m still over-identified with the feminine parts of myself. And some elements of a codependent relationship remain. Through my long depressive spells I felt a responsibility toward my parents (and my mum, particularly) to protect them. I felt bad that they should have to suffer a depressed son. My mum’s expressions of faith in me “I knew you could do it” “I’ve always said you were a good singer,” have left me unconvinced, a little touchy: “Of course you would say that, you’re my mum.”
I remember childhood dreams of taking my innards out (putting my hand down my throat and pulling my lungs out). These images, according to post-Freudians are common (perhaps universal) and seem to relate to the very young infant’s wish to recompense for fantasies of destruction that may be aimed at mother when she is absent for more than a moment.

Blue Marsden takes me through an exercise called a Cord Break, whilst I’m in trance. He briefs me that, although this exercise enables relationships to become more adult, more healthy, by dissolving unconscious infantile emotional ties, the subject can experience feelings of grief afterward. Ok.

A visualisation: the people I know are stars floating in time and space. Some of these stars are joined together by cords. As imagined cords spontaneously break, uncoil and shrink whilst my body spasms and twists (this is not a common response in trance work), the connection of light (unconditional love), between mother and child remain.

I am to imagine my own hands tapping on the heart. I repeat: “I am my own person... [and something else, which I have forgotten]”

Again my gestures and Blue’s words seem to correspond in a kind of dance. I’m not sure who’s leading who? My right hand cruises around and comes to a rest in mid-air. Blue Marsden says “Each hand can represent the male and female sides of yourself as they find new ways to integrate.” I do the bringing hands together thing...they come together to the top of my head, stroke my face, pause at my throat and then at the point that (Blue tells me) is known in Chinese medicine as the power chakra. My hands begin to tap there, as I had been instructed to do imaginatively, some minutes previously.

Blue invites me to integrate today’s learning. My hands go up to my mouth together, as if feeding me.

Even though I am now out of trance and very much ‘back in the room’, I continue to spasm as we discuss next steps. And after I leave I walk down the Bayswater Road like The Cat from Red Dwarf, rolling my limbs and seated firmly in the darkness of my body, like a pleasant old man nestling in his favourite armchair. I’m feeling very clear – like a weight has gone.

I am more my own person, more adult, less tied to secret imaginary apron strings. But I’m aware that the last part of today’s session, ‘integrating the male and female parts’ is going to take more work – it will require a little more than simply bringing my hands together in trance.

Dream Lover

2009-07-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

Don’t make me wake, we’ll walk a while
Through gold and green, under a sky of leaves
And when I wake, I’ll take a taste of you
Upon my lips

Don’t make me wake, we’ll gather flowers
And name ‘em for this night of nameless hours
And when I wake, I’ll take a touch of you
Under my skin

Dream lover
Dream lover lover lover

Don’t make me wake, just make you mine
At night I come and fear to find you gone
Would that you were awoken in the world
The waiting world

Dream lover
Dream lover lover lover

Dream Lover, Saunders

So, I got my voice. And the path to finding it had little to do with practising my scales. The ‘process’ I am on is opening out to an altogether wider vista. It seems that in order to sing, I need to be a freer person.

Now, I have an image directly out in front of me: it is too vague for me to see properly, but it represents a plateau that I am about to climb up to. Unconsciously, I can see the image and I believe that it is the mythological ‘sacred marriage’: symbol of an individual’s (re)union with him or herself.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve written numerous songs about unrequited love/dead lovers/female suicides/suicide pacts/dream women. Not things I’ve suffered or known, so why return to those themes again and again? After reading Jung and Joseph Campbell five or six years ago, I learned that when a woman appears in a man’s dreams and stories she is invariably a symbol of his own ‘soul’. This frustrated urge to meet ‘the muse’ is symbolic of his wish to connect once and for all with his own greater Self, the Other Within, the totality of who he is, masculine and feminine. The ‘anima’ figure is a guide, the first contact who points the way to that Self.
When one experiences a drought of love within, in one’s relationship with oneself, then one will surely feel that lack of love without. Where do I belong in this world? And to love oneself. What on earth does that mean? It’s something we feel uncomfortable to define or even talk about. A frisson of embarrassment attached to it. Navel-gazing. Masturbation etc etc.

I’ve been feeling that this Divine Mother/sacred marriage thing needs to be resolved, before I can really start. This holding out is a pattern I’ve ‘always’ had...I can only move when everything is absolutely tickety-boo. Holding out for perfection, my travel bag is never packed.

I did TAT (the acupressure technique) for these feelings and I’m reassured.

I sense that it’s not far ahead now: that I am about to find something fundamental and significant. Not The End of my journey entirely, but perhaps similar to the £32,000 in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. A landmark, a plateau, which will not be taken away, which will not dissolve beneath my feet in times of trouble. A prize that (mixing my gameshow metaphors) is mine to keep.

Blame It On The Boogie

2009-05-13T14:49:00.001-07:00

Perhaps my role as writer of this blog is being modified. I’m now potentially stepping out beyond my rationalist comfort zone, and becoming an investigative journalist of the human spirit! The role requires that I reconcile the ‘exorcism’ that I experienced in the post (I can recommend angels) with the materialism of my more pragmatic reader (i.e. me). I’ll attempt to reconcile below.

Travelling across London on the tube to see Blue Marsden, the holistic therapist, for TAT and Vow Break interventions I speed-read the meatiest sections of ‘Descartes’ Baby’, by developmental psychologist Paul Bloom. Bloom’s premise is that human beings are born dualists: we experience the world as made up of physical objects (bodies) and mental states (souls). This explains why, for example, we hold an authentic Vermeer in much higher esteem than its fake: the difference between the two paintings is situated entirely in our perception of the intention of the artist (soul), and not in the actual quality of the paintings (body), which are indistinguishable from one another. This inbuilt attribute of the brain also explains the uniquely human capacity for religious feeling and moral thinking: we imbue the cosmos with intention (god) and we aim to treat others well because we recognise that they too, have soul. Because of this perceptual bias we infer that the soul and the body are separate and perhaps independent of one another. Bloom concludes, counter to this intuition, with the thought that the greatest upcoming challenge for humanity will be the acceptance that the soul has no existence independent of physiology. I have so much taken for granted this point of view that I was surprised by Bloom’s assertion. ‘I thought everyone knew that now?’

I’m agnostic (because you know, we can’t really ever know anything for sure), but agnostic with a definite atheist bent: I’m comfortable with the idea that god (and the individual soul) has no extra-mental reality. Isn’t that what the ‘great thinkers’ have been saying ever since Darwin? On the other hand, pretty much every human being ever has believed in some kind of god in one way or another, and it is only in this part of the world, in most recent times, where science and rationalism have convinced a large number of people (including me) that god is simply a ‘pathetic fallacy’ [define]: the imputation of soul and intention to soulless, random phenomena. It’s important to note that the transition has been a painful one. As human beings with ego-consciousness, we need purpose and progress in order to be happy. And purpose and progress are a lot easier to come by if you have some notion of divinity, whether that be ‘lead a good life and you get into heaven’ or something a bit more experiential. Mystical experience (in a nutshell: perceived contact with a transcendent or immanent ‘other’) of various colours and intensities, supports our human inclination to believe in god; many an individual’s unshakeable faith has been based on this type of experience. And such experiences can be very useful in reforming personality (which is more or less the subject of this blog).
I am constantly surprised by how many people who claim no interest in religion, insist nevertheless that ‘there is something bigger than us’ and/or that the soul exists and is separate from the body. And I’m not even talking about New Agers; I’m talking about people who think that the New Age is a load of shit. I once told a girl on a date that god was easily available to anyone who took LSD; that mystical and hallucinogenic episodes were basically identical. Her latent Catholicism bubbled up as anger and I never saw her again. She thought I was mad as a box of frogs. “What you just said is a load of rubbish,” she told me, quaintly. I had an odd conversation with someone recently who was somewhat dismissive when I put to him the case of Science that there is no such thing as the soul. And yet he had a real problem when I told him about my exorcism experience. “Well, if it worked for you!” he said, still in dismissive mode.
“Hang on, I’m the atheist here!” I thought.

To say all of the above again more quickly: we are animals who by virtue of how evolution has built us, have an inclination to believe in the soul/body duality, and for most people life is easier if they do. I would go so far as to say that a great deal of human activity: culture and art, scientific and political progress, is all bricks in the wall of a great edifice designed to protect us from sight of the grave: to enable us to avoid or deny the thought that ‘once you’re dead, you’re dead.’

Who needs opinions? They cause a lot of trouble. And how tiresome to join people for dinner only to listen to them spout their loud redfaced opinions all evening. But if you were to put a gun to my head and tell me that in order for you not to shoot me I would have to nail my colours to a particular mast then all of what I have just said would be that mast.

I like to think I’m in a fortunate position. I’m a pantheist/atheist who believes that Sri Ramakrishna and Richard Dawkins are talking about the same thing without knowing it (the incredible fortunate accident of human consciousness) and yet I can also experience the benefits of a personal ‘exorcism’. Now that, as far as I am concerned is a definition of flexibility.

With all of that as background, here is my materialist explanation of the Vow Break: it’s a powerful hypnotic device for shunting deeply embedded beliefs out of one’s neurology. Our psyches are built upon archetypes. Some people ‘understand’ (perhaps intuitively, perhaps with full consciousness) the primal form and significance of archetypes and can manipulate these forms in ways that are helpful, in ways that work for our benefit. That is basically a definition of ritual: ‘primitive’ people use the fundamental structure of the psyche and its symbol-making function to create ceremonial rites for the purpose of moving individuals and communities through significant life transitions, with grace.
Mainstream rituals in this culture (e.g. the Anglican wedding ceremony; the investiture of the monarch; the stag do) are somewhat dry and divested of their magic. And so the New Age and Self-improvement movements have come up with their own alternatives. These might seem to be a bit artificial, a bit ‘made-up’, and yet they seem to work despite our conscious beliefs and prejudices.

I am writing this as a testament. I’m evidence that, for unknown reasons, these exercises/rituals, whatever you want to call them, work as well as you might want them to work. And apparently you don’t have to believe in them as literal fact (whatever that is). You just have to believe that it doesn’t matter whether you believe in them or not.

All well and good for rationalistic explanations, but perhaps for such things to work for those who don’t define themselves as ‘spiritual’ requires a certain ability to read holy words from an esoteric viewpoint. The text that I recited during the Vow Break would seem to make certain demands of faith and credibility. It does seem pretty literal to say “Archangel Michael, please bring down the tunnel of Light. Ariel, Azrael and Aru-Kiri, please assist. I break any and all agreements or contracts, both conscious and unconscious, that I have made, anyone in my body has made, or anyone in my genetic lineage has made, with any astral entities, thought forms, demons, dark forces, elementals, aliens or boogies. Please go into the tunnel, we will take you home."
I’ve read some comparative mythology and religion, and to me, all of it (religion, myth, ritual) is psychological metaphor. The virgin birth and the resurrection are symbols of the individual’s capacity for psychic renewal; my understanding of karma is that if you think negative thoughts today, you feel bad, and it makes it more likely that you will feel and think negatively tomorrow. As far as I know, the Buddha himself refused to speculate about whether reincarnation was a literal truth (and thereby whether the soul and the body were separate). He preferred to work with what we know for sure right now: what is available to our senses, and how we can work with who we are without recourse to gods and daemons.

So that’s how my pragmatic materialist little mind explains what happened during my own personal ‘exorcism’. And reading it back, I am half inclined to think it would be easier just to believe that the Archangel Michael (the dude who acts as adviser to Adam in Paradise Lost) brought his Tunnel of Light down to St Mary’s in Wandsworth and took my demons and boogies back with him when he left.

After writing this I have a conversation with Blue Marsden. He talks about energies that exist (in the ether, in the psyche?), which can be personified (Archangel Michael on the one hand, The Wicked Witch of the West on the other) and that each culture has its own names for these energies. The Vow Break and similar exercises are methods of rebalancing said energies.

Sparky's Magic Piano

2009-05-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

Several weeks have passed since I blogged the TAT and Vow Break session. What has happened in that time?
Quite a lot. I got what I asked for back in the post “Are You A Hypnotist?”, and more besides. It is as if, as these (barely conscious) clouds clear my psyche, something that has been obscuring my voice all these years begins to clear also – there is an audible difference in clarity and resonance. The voice is there like a tool in a toolbox. I don’t have to think. I don’t worry that it will desert me. I don’t have to go through some bizarre ritual to coax it to life. It is there. It just comes.

The interesting thing is that the voice sort of ‘came in to land’ over the course of the first week. I could feel it resonate in my heart/thorax region for a while, and then it wouldn’t be there so much. But as the days went by, it came to be there more and more of the time.

And when I sing, and sing songs, it is like I am not really singing at all. I am being sung. The voice just comes out and I meekly step out of the way. It reminds me a little of what Brian Wilson said about the vocals on Pet Sounds: something about Carl and he praying to their 1960s oriental/occidental hybrid god, praying for the success of the sessions. And their voices, when they sang, came ‘straight out of their chests’ like a force of nature.

It’s difficult to get across how important and moving an experience this has been for me. It’s like an old friend has returned. An old friend I never met before.

And perhaps due to the appeal to the light masculine energy in the Vow Break exercise, something else has shifted too.
A workmen has been doing our windows. I helped him carry his ladders through the house to his van. He said, “You watching the rugby?”
“No,” I replied, without feeling like I needed to explain or apologise.

I can recommend angels, I’ve watched as they made a man strong

2009-04-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

The Angels of Ashes
Will give back your passions
Again and again

Their light shafts
Will reach through the darkness
And touch you my friend

They'll fly in a mind dance
And blind you with wings
Wrapped in flame

If you're down to an echo
They just might remember
Your name

I can recommend angels
I've watched as they've made a man strong
Oh so strong

If your humbleness shows
Then I'm sure that they'll take you
Along

Scott Walker, The Angels of Ashes

There is still some time after the TAT, so Blue Marsden establishes, via muscle test, that it will be beneficial to do something called a Vow Break. I first heard of this technique a year or so ago. I was on a training course with colleagues, paid for by my last employer (one of the growing number of governmental quangos). I was speaking to one of the trainers during the break about the different self-improvement materials that had been useful to her. She mentioned (in a five minute conversation) that despite doing a lot of inner work, one particular issue of hers seemed immovable. For much of her adult life she was unable to engage sexually with men in a way that was satisfying to her (and presumably to them). She did a Vow Break with a therapist. It involved journeying back in time (by walking a representation of her ‘timeline’ on the floor), to a past life, where she discovered that she had been a nun and made a vow of celibacy. This vow had apparently been carried forward and remained unbroken, in her present life. After performing the Vow Break, her relations with men, and thereby her life, were transformed.
Blue tells me the premise for the Vow Break that we are going to do. It’s quite a tough one for me to swallow. During my adolescence I did some very self-destructive things which were symptoms of and contributors to my depressive state. It’s likely that I would not have been able to build such a head of negativity working entirely on my own. I had, outside of consciousness, made some kind of vow.
I interject (with ambivalent credulity):
“You mean with demonic forces?”
Blue Marsden senses that we are somewhere near the outer boundary of my pretty plastic belief system. Blue tells me that “No-one really knows how this stuff works” (the presupposition being that ‘this stuff does work’) and invites me to look at it another way, another way that I may find more palatable: if you think negatively about yourself, negative circumstances arise in your life: bad moods, rejection, failure etc. Dark clouds gather: a person can end up with a capability for self-destruction that goes way beyond what would initially have been possible. It could be as if ‘something had gotten into them’, as if they were possessed by a demon. I would add to this something of Carl Jung’s view on what used to be known as ‘possession’, and is now known as ‘acting out of character’: that due to the psychic schisms that are inherent to human nature, we each have complexes (such as the shadow, the anima, the animus) that can act as independent personalities. A primitive tribesman might go berserk; a modern citydweller might go shopping; an addict might go through hell to kick the habit, only to jump back into the pit long after the physical withdrawal has passed. And, according to Jung, the motive force of each of these circumstances is likely to be some personified unconscious complex; some personal demon.

Blue warns me that we will be calling on the assistance of the Archangel Michael. “An archetype of the light masculine,” he explains, helpfully.
The actual process consists of Blue reciting some words which I then repeat:

Blue: Archangel Michael...
Danny: Archangel Michael...
Blue: Please bring down the tunnel of Light...
Danny: Please bring down the tunnel of........ (my raised intonation and subsequent pause indicate that I’m concerned that I may have misheard. Did you just say ‘tunnel of light’?)

Afterward, I couldn’t remember any more of the text, but typing ‘Archangel Michael’ and ‘Tunnel of Light’ into google brings up this:

“Archangel Michael Please bring down the tunnel of Light. Ariel, Azrael and Aru-Kiri, please assist."
"I break any and all agreements or contracts, both conscious and unconscious, that I have made, anyone in my body has made, or anyone in my genetic lineage has made, with any astral entities, thought forms, demons, dark forces, elementals, aliens or boogies. Please go into the tunnel, we will take you home."

Cripes.

While we recite these words, I am jerking around in my seat, then bent double again, arms hanging to the ground. As I hang there, every sinew of my being blown out on some astral wind, I have a couple of notable sensations.
First, some vestige of my ego-consciousness speaks inside my head: “If the lads could see me now!”

The second experience is somewhat less explicable. The room (did I mention we are in the Vestry Hall of a St Mary Magdalene church where Blue runs a regular Qigong class?) seems to be flooded with light. I say seems to be flooded with light because throughout the process my eyes are closed. I’m not a great visualiser, yet I can conjure up a vague image of a candle or a lightbulb in my head, and I have tried to use mental images of light in meditation from time to time. But this is different. Rather than seeing a point of light in the dark space inside my skull, the light enters into my consciousness through my closed eyelids. They are lit up pink – like when you try to sleep off a hangover during the day, but the daylight is too intense for your eyelids and your aching head to shut out. I am sorely tempted to open my eyes and take a look around, catch the Archangel doing his stuff, like a kid tries to fight off sleep on Christmas Eve for a glimpse of Santa Claus. But I don’t open my eyes. I mean, I don’t actually believe in this stuff, do I?

Soon I am raised up and my arms stretch wide – I have taken on the posture, quite unwittingly, of the Christ crucified (save for the fact I am seated in a little wooden vestry chair). Blue warned me that one or both of us may let out some strange noises during the process. I’m a little disappointed that I don’t get to join in on this act (I am here as a singer in search of his voice, after all), but Blue makes up for that: at key points he intones syllables that sound a bit like the quasi-Native American utterances that I have heard in Ennio Morricone scores. The sheer guttural power of it is shocking coming from a softly spoken man like Blue.

Once the process is complete we sit for a few moments facing one another, settling back into something a bit more like normality.
“Not everyone who comes for singing hypnosis gets that,” deadpans Blue.
“What?” I counter. “An exorcism?”

We laugh.

Golden Touch

2009-04-16T03:55:00.000-07:00

Second session with Blue Marsden. I tell him that I actually don't want to perform yet. There is something to do beforehand. After hearing the story about the onset of depression during adolescence, and the self-destructive behaviour that I went in for, Blue does the muscle test again (described in 'Are You A Hypnotist?') and the therapeutic technique we are going to use is called TAT.
"You have just asked my unconscious if we should use TAT, but I don't even know what TAT is."
"A part of you knows," says Blue.

The part of me that knows is, according to Blue, the 'collective unconscious'. I read Jung some years ago, and I took from that an idea of the collective unconscious as the shared inheritance of innate symbol-making modules we carry in the deep unconscious areas of our brain. The human species evolved as a system: we each carry a capacity for understanding the archetypal roles of mother, father, lover, child etc and this is apparently true a priori, even before we have experience of particular individuals fulfilling these roles. The male carries within him the 'imprint' of female, and vice versa – the mutual recognition is necessary for the continuation of the species.
I buy all of that: a chick is looking for its mother the moment it hatches. And in the absence of mother it will latch onto any object in the vicinity in order to fulfil the role. But this image-making capacity, formed in our primeval neurology, does not explain how ‘some part of me’ could answer Blue's question: "Is TAT the method to use?"
It appears to me that the notion of collective unconscious prevailing in the room today is a little broader, a little more esoteric or mystical than the one I absorbed from Jung.

Blue says I will have taken in the information, soaked it up from the culture, because these ideas are now at large: viz, I have heard of TAT, even though I don't know I have heard of it.
It's a feasible explanation, but pretty difficult to swallow. It sounds like Aldous Huxley's notion of Mind-at-Large, which the loveable old neurotic expounds to the point of tedium in The Doors of Perception. If I could cleanse the doors of perception, will everything appear to me as it really is - infinite? Do I know everything, everywhere, if only I can turn off the 'reducing valve' of the ego? Can I learn to utilise this meta-channel of universal knowing to win the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Slumdog Millionaire (without getting tipped off by Anil Kapoor in the gents’)?

Through self-hypnosis I have asked questions of my unconscious and the answer has come in dreams or in waking insight. However, had I wanted to find out whether TAT (something I had never heard of) was the appropriate therapeutic intervention, my belief is that I would be better off asking Jeeves, rather than my dreams. Perhaps unnervingly, Blue Marsden is speaking with a 'part of me' that I myself do not yet have access to: a part of my unconscious more unconscious than the part of the unconscious I am becoming more conscious of!

TAT is a newish form of acupressure, one branch upon a burgeoning tree of miraculous do-it-yourself hands-on healing techniques. This new field of 'energy psychology' includes other medicines like TFT and EFT. And yes, when Blue Marsden first mentioned TAT, I thought, "Is that something like EFT?" So, a part of me did know. Sort of.

If you like your medicine conventionally Western, you may have difficulty fitting energy psychology and techniques like TAT into your belief system. They generally involve touching or tapping particular parts of your body at the same time as reciting a simple script that holds in awareness the symptom or situation one aims to deal with. Practitioners make extraordinary claims for the removal of an array of problems, including clearing the severe post-traumatic stress disorder of Vietnam vets in minutes – suffering that no other therapy has been able to touch in decades. Mind boggling. Our culture is wary of such miracle cures. If I was to try to explain the premise to myself I would say something like this:

An animal escapes from a predator with its life. Once it is sure that it is no longer under threat, the animal goes off into the forest and shakes the trauma out of its body. In this way, it moves on, free of the trauma. When human beings face traumatic events, we generally do not have a similar means to physically expend the physical and emotional stress. Our image-making minds can assail us with fearful images for a long time afterward, and we can relive the trauma emotionally at any time. Our bodies begin to reflect the unhealed trauma which is etched in our faces and distorts our physiognomy. You can see people’s pain in their posture and in their nervous tics.
Perhaps TAT and acupressure are buttons we can press to release the body-locked energy of trauma – a bit like the shaking healing mentioned in previous posts, but with a focus on specific ills.

Anyway, I’m willing to trust and see what happens.

So we do the TAT process, in relation to forgiveness: essentially forgiving myself on an unconscious level for the impact that my depression had on my life and those closest to me. The dream that I described in the post ‘O No, Not My Baby’, transmitted a potent psychic charge of guilt, and that came as a surprise – I was not conscious of feeling that. The dream depicted my responsibility in putting to death my own capacity for hope and possibility. I allowed my ‘Child’ to fall to his death from an open window.
Inappropriate guilt debilitates, and it seems that I have been carrying it around for a long time.

As we go through each brief stage of the TAT process my body does its symbolic movement thing. One moment, I am doubled up over my left knee, groaning, tears in my eyes, my face contorted. It is like I am an actor, doing a thoroughly convincing impression of someone in extreme physical pain. There is no actual pain. Then, the crisis is expended, the spasm dissipates, my torso rises and I return to an upright sitting posture of which any Buddhist meditator would be proud (were Buddhists allowed to feel pride).

The whole process takes all of five minutes. I feel good, relieved. Later, I ask my unconscious if there are any remnants of this guilt and shame. No there are not my head shakes. As ever, the proof will be in what happens next. Has this adventure taken me any closer to realising the dream of performing music?

We're Off To See The Wizard

2009-04-08T22:08:00.000-07:00

The four travellers passed a sleepless night, each thinking of the gift Oz had promised to bestow upon him. Dorothy fell asleep only once, and then she dreamed she was in Kansas, where Aunt Em was telling her how glad she was to have her little girl at home again.
Promptly at nine o'clock the next morning the green-whiskered soldier came to them, and four minutes later they all went into the Throne Room of the Great Oz. Of course each one of them expected to see the Wizard in the shape he had taken before, and all were greatly surprised when they looked about and saw no one at all in the room. They kept close to the door and closer to one another, for the stillness of the empty room was more dreadful than any of the forms they had seen Oz take.
Presently they heard a Voice, seeming to come from somewhere near the top of the great dome, and it said solemnly, "I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Why do you seek me?"
They looked again in every part of the room, and then, seeing no one, Dorothy asked,
"Where are you?"
"I am everywhere," answered the Voice, "but to the eyes of common mortals I am invisible. I will now seat myself upon my throne, that you may converse with me." Indeed, the Voice seemed just then to come straight from the throne itself: so they walked toward it and stood in a row while Dorothy said:
"We have come to claim our promise, O Oz."
"What promise?" asked Oz.
"You promised to send me back to Kansas when the Wicked Witch was destroyed," said the girl.
"And you promised to give me brains," said the Scarecrow.
"And you promised to give me a heart," said the Tin Woodman.
"And you promised to give me courage," said the Cowardly Lion.
"Is the Wicked Witch really destroyed? asked the Voice, and Dorothy thought it trembled a little.
"Yes," she answered, "I melted her with a bucket of water."
"Dear me," said the Voice. "How sudden! Well, come to me tomorrow, for I must have time to think it over."
"You've had plenty of time already," said the Tin Woodman angrily.
"We shan't wait a day longer," said the Scarecrow.
"You must keep your promises to us!" exclaimed Dorothy.
The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little, old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face, who seemed to be as much surprised as they were. The Tin Woodman, raising his axe, rushed toward the little man and cried out,
"Who are you?"
"I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," said the little man, in a trembling voice, "but don't strike me - please don't! - and I'll do anything you want me to."
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

So for a few days some part of my system has been ‘striking’. I have squandered quite a few hours that were scheduled for music production and practise.

I did a ‘Betty’ [Erickson self-hypnosis] the other night because I was very tired and needed to make the most of the few hours sleep I would get before my daughter woke. I asked Betty to let me rest at ‘the core of my being’. What I intended by the phrase was simply to allow me a deeply restful sleep. To state it in a scientific way: to allow my sleep to consist of the maximum amount of time with the brainwaves occurring at their slowest rate. When this is achieved in meditation all kinds of wonderful healing, rejuvenating things happen. And of course, thoughts cease, which is perhaps the most restful thing of all. I expected a calm dreamfree state. What I got was mostly that with a little extra something for me to chew on. I had a dream where I looked in my bedroom mirror and was dismayed at the sight of my own reflection. And when I say ‘dismay’, I mean it was like the bottom dropped out of everything; the energy drained away; my interior was emptied of air, emptied of life. How could you accomplish anything if your own image carried the negative charge of death?

And this self-rejection is apparently what resides at ‘the core of my being’.

I have relentlessly pursued change: altered behaviour, renovated beliefs, resurrected purpose. But here, at the level of my core identity, this old painful debilitating self-image has resurfaced. I was aware of it years ago, and with the help of antidepressants was able to move past it and get out and function in the world. Over the course of several years it ceased to matter. And yet, apparently, it’s still there, subtly pulling the strings of every action and interaction in my life. I acknowledge it as the founding-stone-on-quicksand of what has thwarted my musical productivity and willingness to perform.
I have followed the Yellow Brick Road, enlisted helpers, found magical charms, and overcome trials – all the time getting closer to the Emerald City, my solution. And just when I least expected it, when I only sought to ‘get home’ to myself, to get a good night’s sleep – the screen has been tipped away, to reveal the god who has been living in my heart.

Perhaps I am placing too much emphasis on one dream: it’s just a throwback, surely? A bad memory. Well, I have had similar dreams each night since, and I’ve been inactive during the days, disheartened and feeling like my body is made of chalk, despite throwing Betty at it.

The message is clear: this is your dragon, dwelling in the inmost cave, and you must slay it or live in its shadow forever.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

2009-04-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Hour Work Is Never Over
Bangalter/Birdsong/De Homem-Christo, Harder Better Faster Stronger

I have discovered a work ethic for the first time in my life. Practise and progress provide their own reward. It’s surprising how quickly one’s repertoire and ability can extend by doing a little each day. And there is chemical pleasure in stretching the muscles in the guitarist’s hand and the singer’s diaphragm, and creating new neural pathways in the brain. Of course, you knew all that. I’m enjoying the time and absorption in practise without an eye on the outcome. Reminds me of what Gita said, way back when.

Name That Tunesmith

2009-04-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

Blue Marsden has asked me for my birth name exactly as it appears on my birth certificate.
I think he will test its 'vibrations' to see if my name could be a hindrance to my true identity.
On a purely pragmatic level, I have never felt completely at home with my name (which is a common enough experience). And that would surely hold one back? Like feeling that you were a woman trapped in a man's body or something.

What is the crux of this? That I associate my name with my history – I have heard it in the mouths of too many c*nts. Sometimes the world has been a difficult place for me to live in. There is prejudice and unkindness; people who lack the ability to see their impact on others, and without the awareness that their conflicts start with themselves: denial so often mistaken for strength. Why not put Danny Saunders to death and start again? A new name, La Vita Nuova: to treat others better and be treated better, to love more and be loved more, to do better than I did so far.

Perhaps he will suggest I change it to Moon Unit or something?! I hope so.

What will I tell my daughter?
“Pigeon, you can change anything you like. That is called freedom.”

What will I tell my folks?
“Erm...you know that name you gave me? You wouldn’t mind if I took it back and changed it for another, would you?”

Octavia

2009-04-03T03:59:00.001-07:00

I wasn’t there cos I got a bit scared, and I hid my head
Under the bed and all the other kids
Were taken away and the very next day, in a lonely pen
She wrote me a note and it said she couldn’t live

Octavia
I was your saviour
But I could not save you
Now the pain I feel
Octavia
I was your saviour
But I could not save you
And the pain is real

She cried like a wounded dog through the night, and it wore her out
I was just a kid myself how can it be?
That I was to blame, though I felt the shame, all through many long years
So I went to the chapel and I asked Him to forgive

Octavia
I was your saviour
But I could not save you
Now the pain I feel
Octavia
I was your saviour
But I could not save you
And the pain is real

Hey la, Shay la
Hey la, De la soul

So I went back home and I visited the stone of my mother dear
And I made my peace with the past and the things I did
As I turned away on that beautiful day, and yet the memory remains
She wrote me a note and it said she couldn’t live.

(Saunders)

We Sing Hallelujah

2009-04-03T03:49:00.000-07:00

I recorded a vocal and a bunch of harmony parts for a new song called 'Octavia' today. First time I have ever been really happy with a recording of my voice. I did a little 5 minute self hypnosis to keep my mind out of the way before I sang. Felt like I had the time and space to place the vocal in the song...and it was almost effortless. For the first time.

The song is an absurd Wild West ballad with a dynamic rolling feel. I like it.

Are You A Hypnotist?

2009-04-03T03:23:00.000-07:00

Went to see Blue Marsden, a hypnotherapist/vocal coach (who has worked with loads of singers, including some ‘big names’, over the last 20 years or so.) We talk about my adventures so far and desired outcomes for my voice:

1. To discover what my voice really is...where it is at its best. I am a baritone, I cross into my head voice quite low (and I'm not clear on the distinction in my voice between head and falsetto). I would like to explore the 'gap'. When I sing high it is warmly received...however, I can't help but think there could be more weight in it.
2. To get more control over what particular version of my voice is going to come out on any particular day.
3. To make my confidence and performance ability robust. I have had issues with depression in the past, and setbacks tend to knock me off course for way too long.
4. I'm ok on pitch, but breathing and strength could do with some work. I guess these are things I can work on at home, once I know what I am doing.

Blue Marsden wants to concentrate on the psychological stuff. I can get contemporary vocal coaching elsewhere, cheaper. I hold my arm out in front of me and Blue asks some questions with the words all jumbled up. My unconscious understands the questions, and answers before my conscious mind has the opportunity to interfere, to um and arr. If the answer is ‘yes’ my arm stays suspended, if ‘no’, my arm collapses onto my lap.

"Is this singing thing a high priority?" Yes.

"Have we reached the crux of the issue in our discussion so far?" No. More.

I tell Blue about my discomfort with putting myself onstage, with being a show-off, with everyone looking.

“What do you want?” To be able to rely on my voice. Consistency, with no need for preparation rituals. No clearing of the throat between every line.

“What does that give you?” Self-assurance.

“What will you do if you never get that?” Forge on regardless.

“What’s the best thing that you could get out of this?” A vague image pops up – a sort of warm circle. It’s connecting with people in a dialogue. I want my voice to be there, something I can depend upon, like a party piece...I can wheel it out and show it, almost as if it is an entity separate from myself (and therefore not subject to personal tribulations).

Blue Marsden has me crash down into trance in seconds. My flesh drips from my bones and then my bones drip. Spontaneous movement begins almost immediately. My head rolls around in a figure of eight and my elbow jerks out like I am bellowing bagpipes or doing half a birdie dance.

I am led to a glass door labelled ‘Alignment’. As Blue talks, my body does its own thing. My left hand opens into the sun symbol. And then rests on my lap again. Shortly, both hands begin to move up and out. Blue uses a technique called ‘utilization’: he brings what is happening in my body into the body of his words – interpreting the movements in a symbolic and useful way. My rising arms hold a mushrooming magnetic energy field. He instructs my hands to turn to face one another and then come together, and the fingers to interlock. One hand is ego and one hand is Self, and they are to come together in order to work together: each will perform its particular task, and won’t interfere with the other. It’s a spontaneous restatement of the ‘Resolving Internal Conflict’ pattern described fourteen million times in previous posts.
The spasming is my neurology/ the unconscious/ subtle energies (whichever way you prefer to think of it) realigning; my system is opening up, preparing me to become a channel for communication of “words, voice and something else”: that’s ‘why I’m here’. Some people will ‘get it’ and others won’t. I laugh cheerfully.

Blue is glad I came to see him: other hypnotherapists may have freaked out at the spasming and involuntary symbolic movement. Most clients slump and slacken when in trance. Blue actually teaches classes to help people access spontaneous jerk and wobble: a powerful healing state, coveted in spiritual traditions worldwide. People don't generally just do it. Blue asks me when it started. I tell him the story about when I taught myself yoga nidra (body asleep, mind awake) because it felt nice to rest deep and silent in the dark grotto of my body. At first I was alarmed by the jerking about, but for several days after felt utterly at peace, bright, alive, rejuvenated. And everything in the world shone with that inner light that Aldous Huxley talks about in The Doors of Perception – the taps in the bathroom; the dappled and frosted grass in the garden; the blue gravel in someone’s driveway, and the wonderful unseen palette of subtle colours (greens, purples, yellows, oranges) in any individual face.

Serially Monsongamous

2009-04-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

"Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true.... They are curiosity, confidence, courage and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence." Walt Disney

I meet Angus at Golden Square. Today, we have scheduled a ‘proper’ session (more formal than the handy life-enhancing moments we frequently share over coffee). We are going to do the ‘Disney Strategy’.

I tell Angus that, while I am definitely ‘out of retirement’, I don’t know how I’m going to do ‘it’ yet. There is a lot to think about. Recording. Rehearsing a band. Gigs. I have a lot of songs written for expansive orchestral forces! (a record company budget would help – and there is another reason why one might think success is important). Perhaps I will rearrange for ‘inexpansive’ or inexpensive orchestral forces...or busk...

Angus runs his own coaching business called Streetcoaching, his chief innovation being that most of the work is done out of doors, with the inspiring London cityscape as backdrop. The idea is that the stimulus of the environment and getting the body moving brings a new dimension to how our minds work and learn.

The Disney Strategy involves marking out spaces on the floor which correspond to ‘Dreamer’, ‘Realist’ and ‘Critic’ functions. I have the luxury of space. There are two ornamental garden fixtures at either end of Golden Square, and a huge statue in the middle. I attach one function to each of these features.

In the first round, I connect easily with planner and critic. I recall times when I have exemplified both of those roles. I am having trouble remembering a time when I was an uninhibited dreamer. Angus suggests we step out of the three positions, and review. I walk out of the Square altogether and we stand on the opposite side of Lower James St, Perhaps I can get some perspective from here (this would hardly be possible had we met in Angus’ office). From this ‘meta-position’ I see the dreamer me – the boy who did things without reservation, naturally, honestly, and with every expectation of completion: actually, with no concept whatsoever of incompletion. And total identity with the play/the creation.

We return to the ‘dreamer’ position, so that I can experience that at firsthand. A chap in green approaches. My first thought is he wants a light or something, but he is from the Parks Department, and wants his Square back. They are closing for the night. So, we got ejected from the dream again. Oops.

Angus encourages me to inhabit the dream as we wander through Soho looking for coffee. I tell him that I saw a big radiant orb and within it colourful image-nuggets (with sound). I begin to carry it out in front of me, in my imagination. These nuggets are a random selection of my considerable ‘back catalogue’.

“It’s a bag of gems.”

“So what is the dream?” says Angus, patiently, as we sit down outside a street corner cafe, replete with caffeine drinks.

“To have a bag of gems.” Then, and only then, to open the bag and see what 'it' is. Keep the planner and the critic out of the way for a while. No overarching schemes, no concept albums, no musicals. I won’t think about structure until I have the raw materials.
And there is something about how to get those gems into the bag. I have a hard drive full of two or three albums worth of half finished songs. You can't put half of a gem in a bag and then half of another one. You have to put a whole one in. “Otherwise the bag stays empty,” says Angus.

(I met a knitter who told me she has a scarf, a shawl, a beanie hat and a crochet thing on the go. “How do you expect to finish one, with the others calling for your attention all the time?” I asked her. It’s easy to see other people’s lunacy.)

Meanwhile, back in Soho, I’m in a light trance looking into the near distance. Angus is looking intently at me. A passing fellow pauses, touches my knee, nods his head toward Angus, and says, “Take him to Paris; make him smile.”

We laugh. Angus calls it a quantum flirt: “How can we use that? Who’s going to Paris? Who’s smiling?”

“You’ve got to go there. Becoming...being joy? A cosmic smile. Something has been allowed to happen. Some little wheel has turned.”

“Who else is smiling?”

“I am. I open the bag and my face is lit up, like the boy in the Box of Delights.”

I conclude that now is a time for dreaming. We dispense with the Realist and the Critic. At least for today.

I don’t need the overarching scheme that I thought I needed for meaning. That gets in the way....the energy, the love, the joy is the meaning, and that comes from somewhere else.

I will live, breathe and eat the song that I am making....while I am making it and until it is finished.

I will get some shining gemstones. And a velvet bag. And a folder on the computer named ‘Bag of gems’. I’ll keep all the other songs somewhere else. When I complete one song, I’ll move its file into the folder and place one gem in the bag. And then move on to the next.

Thanks Angus.

I Am The Cosmos

2009-04-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

Now it’s time to do the ‘Logical Levels’ exercise again. You may remember I did it a while back, with a guide. I discovered blankness at the level of purpose. This time I’m going to do it on my own.

Here is something I wrote earlier, which will explain my intention in doing the exercise:
Logical Levels is great for giving the mindbody system an experience of what it might feel like if every part of you was aligned to a particular goal. And an experience of that alignment, a sense of it in your mind and body, becomes a memory: something that you can draw on to remind you of what it is you are supposed to be doing. I don't know of a way to conjure up that kind of energy or experience purely by thinking about it. When I first did these kinds of exercises - especially the ones where you mark out spaces on the floor that change your experience as you step from one spot to another - I was amazed. I guess it is as potent as play for children, or ritual for ‘primitives’. The unconscious mind knows what to do. You say, "Right, now I am going to step here and become such and such aspect of myself, or such and such perspective on this situation," and you do. It can work like magic.

I seem to be very much a person who experiences the world through his body and emotions, and stepping through these exercises I have experienced some very powerful sensations in my body, plus brighter and clearer images than I am prone to see normally...and of course, my old favourite - the auditory hallucination.

So let’s see what it has for me today. I want to find out what exactly I find up there, out beyond my own identity.

I write the words ‘Environment’; ‘Behaviour’; ‘Capabilities’; ‘Beliefs’; ‘Identity’; and ‘Purpose’ on six separate post-it notes and place the notes on the floor, equally spaced. I will step into each space in sequence, asking myself relevant questions as I go.

ENVIRONMENT
I see a wheel split evenly into 8 coloured sectors. This represents a balanced life. Harmony. I feel joy.

BEHAVIOUR
I begin marching (on the spot). Steady progress. Putting in the work. The rhythm feels a bit trancey.

CAPABILITY
The word ‘Voice’ comes to mind. I can sing. I have the tools.
Motivation. Yes. Work to my strengths. Simplicity.

BELIEFS
A loud “Ahhhhhhhhh” comes out of my mouth. I am not singing it. I take on the stable posture of a warrior. I’m like a Maori bent on frightening the Queen as she steps off the Royal jet. Belief in me. Validity.

IDENTITY
The voice intones: “Vvvvmmmmmmmmm” (like a Zen hoover). I grow in stature. Becoming more who I am. An expression of authenticity.

PURPOSE (beyond personal identity)
A new sound emanates from my body: “Dhvvvvvvvvvv”. My arms cycle in a dance casting a shadow against the wall. The thing I am looking at (my own shadow on the wall) and the thing that is looking at the thing I am looking at are one and the same. Awareness is lit-up, infinitesimal gradations of light/shade, the world has popped out into three dimensions, space and bottomless quiet, my body weighs nothing, it is the six surfaces of the room and the air inbetween, dissolved, heart is a pouring forth, air buzzes with positive charge.
The dancing shadow reminds me of a statuette of four-armed Shiva: the Indian symbol of the glorious radiance of the cosmos unfolding in time. And I too am of that radiance. I am that.

I retrace each of the steps, with the postures, the gestures and the vocalisations. I have a ‘dance’.

I read somewhere that what the world needs more of is people who have come alive- and this is my coming alive. My purpose/my duty is to carry this message through song. That is the function of my little cog in the cosmic wheel. So I will act as exemplar, conduit for the divine moment, where the perfection of eternity breaks through into time.

Yeah.

Next steps:
Singing exercises daily.
Betty Erickson singing hypnosis daily for 21 days.
Do only what works and comes naturally. Sing only parts that come easily.
As this exercise has shown, SINGING really has the power to deliver me into NOW. My voice (rather than my functional guitaring and my fancy arrangements) is my instrument, and should be my focus. I will get a vocal coach.

Don't Hold Back Your Love

2009-03-31T15:50:00.000-07:00

I play Angus a few original compositions: old demos of varying production quality. The arpeggio figure of “And Death Has No Power to Part Us” puts Angus in mind of a piece by Philip Glass from the ‘digital opera’, “Monsters of Grace”. He plays it, and I google the lyrics later. They are by the Persian mystic, Rumi. And this verse from ‘An Artist Comes to Paint You’ seems apt to where I am right now. Serendipity.

Your love reveals your beauty,
but all coverings would disappear
if only for a moment your holding back
would sit before your generosity
and ask,

"Sir, who are You?"

Having listened to a selection of my half-finished demos, Angus (speaking as a friend, rather than a coach), says, “I think you should do music, Danny.”

I Found That Essence Rare

2009-03-31T15:44:00.001-07:00

After breakfast, Angus asks me to imagine a sort of draftsman’s stencil laid out on the table in front of me. This stencil represents ‘consensus reality’, how who I am will manifest in the ‘real world’. Behind this stencil, Angus assures me, is my ‘essence’: the real me. The stencil is laid over the background essence to organise or modify the essence for public consumption. I’m not primarily a visualiser, so this one is a stretch for me, but I trust Angus. He asks me to remove the stencil, and see what is underneath – are there any words written on my essence? In fuzzy warm red/pink letters are the words: ‘songs’ and ‘stories’.

Now, says Angus, take that essence and put it into your body, in any way you like.

I experience this essence ‘song’ rising from the earth through my body and out of my mouth, like a stream of fuzzy red/pink flowing light. My essence is song.

I’ve come a long way.

Then, we look at the stencil again. It stands for the practicalities of putting the show on the road. At this moment, my heart is more in the essence area.

I make a mental note to explore each aspect of the project using an exercise developed by Robert Dilts, called the Disney Strategy. It apparently takes the coachee through the same stages that Walt went through each time he developed a movie.

The Warmth Of The Sun

2009-03-31T15:19:00.000-07:00

“In the depth of winter I finally learned that, within me, there lay an invincible summer.” Albert Camus

Over omelette I talked about my experiences since I last saw Angus. How I had been convinced that music was the inappropriate partner that I was leaving behind. How I had felt bereft. I explained to him about the two sides of the conflict, and that I had begun to think there was no ‘truth’ in one position or the other – I had to basically make a decision, and I had chosen to go with unconscious faith rather than conscious doubt. Still, how was it going to happen? How am I going to quieten the doubts so that the inner Self can shine?

Angus asked me “How would ‘stopping’ look if it was a gesture in your hand?”

My hand screwed up into a tight fist. “Tightness, blackness.”

How would ‘doing it’ look?

My left hand opened out involuntarily, wide so that my joints were stretched. “Love. The sun. Increase.”

Angus asked if he could share with me something that had occurred to him: “They look like paper and stone.”

“Paper wraps stone” I said, and brought the outstretched sunfingers of my left hand to embrace the cold dead moon of my right. It was an impromptu rendition of the moment in Resolving Internal Conflict where the two parts come together. It felt powerful. I will take this gesture with me. I have accepted that the downward phase, when as a creative person, one feels defeated, futile, or worse, will come up again. Yet, this moment, this gesture will be a talisman. The moon may eclipse the sun from time to time. But in the morning, the sun will shine again.

Later, we listen to Gavin Bryars ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’. I think about the doom that we all share in death, the submission of the ego to our individual destruction. But because we will die is no reason to live as if one is already dead.

Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing

2009-03-30T14:09:00.000-07:00

Remembering how I laughed when I saw the ad for James Morrison’s album in one of the Sunday supplements last year. The record was entitled “Songs for You, Truths for Me”, which seemed a bit pretentious, maybe, and insulting to his audience.
I held up the ad and said, incredulously – “Have you heard what they’ve called James Morrison’s new album?” And sure, Ben, Fritz and Karla were equally amused by it.

Imagine my mortification as I write this months later, with the realisation that I have been wearing a pretty similar pair of blinkers.

This idea about ‘being the curator, and no longer the museum piece’ (see previous post), brought up something else to do with the distance between the singer and the song.
I have this block about baring my soul onstage when, as far as the listener is concerned, it’s just a song: they either like it or they don’t. What it ‘really means’ is irrelevant. I was talking to a painter called Sam, who has exactly the same pernicious thought about her own masterpieces. So I may be stupid, but I’m not alone.
I’m reminded of the non-feelings of blankness and emptiness I got at the top of the logical levels exercise [Move On Up]. It is as if I have been holding an unconscious belief that, outside of or beyond oneself, there is no purpose in the attempt to communicate through art! It’s all completely futile!
Because I’m not connected with the value that my music may have for the listener (despite a million people telling me for a billion years more that I have a rare talent) I feel like I would be doing it entirely for myself – and that wouldn’t do. I’ve mentioned several times previously that it's easier for me to value the community-oriented work that I am training to do as my paying career. I can see the direct contribution that the work makes to people’s lives. It’s no bad thing that I wish to do that. It’s a psychological fact due to the way our brains have evolved (with selfish and altruistic traits) that people are more motivated toward, and get more satisfaction from, doing something that helps others, rather than something that helps only themselves. My problem here is that I am basically thinking: “Singing songs? What’s the use of that, when you could be out saving lives?” Give that man a Blue Peter badge.

Of course what James Van Morrison and I have both overlooked is the very important truth that it is the job of the writer to use the song form: words, melody and arrangement, to reveal the emotional heart of the song. In the best songs, words and music reflect, support or otherwise comment on each other. And the moment when communication happens may be divine. I remember that. I just don’t feel it anymore.

Just listening to James Morrison and Nelly Furtado’s ‘Broken Strings’ (from the album ‘Songs for You, Truths for Me’) on myspace. Truths for me? I don’t believe you. If I lost my way, began to believe that I was best off out of it, then, in the face of vapid horrors such as this, I can forgive myself.

The Model

2009-03-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

Find someone that does what you want to do and ask them how they do it.

I spoke to Emma, a poet who regularly reads her work at venues around London. I have near perfect auditory memory, so this transcription is pretty close to the actual conversation.

“Why do you read your poetry in public?”

“Because people ask me too.”

I persevere. “Why do you do it? What’s in it for you?”

“I actually don’t like doing it. It looms over me like a dark cloud several days before the reading.”

There must be something pretty powerful that gets you onto the stage then?

“I owe it to the poems. Because they are good and deserve to be heard.”

That sounds like the poems have a life of their own? Aren’t they just a series of words?

“They do have a life of their own. Left on the page they are sort of dead. If you bring them out and give them life, it’s like death and bad things won’t get it all their own way.”

So this is about defiance? In some way you are having a temporary victory over death?

“Yes.”

So Emma performs the poems she writes, in spite of herself, as if she is their servant. This is interesting to me because it overturns my main problem with performance – that it’s an exercise in blatant egotism. Blatant egoism is probably ok, if you’re twenty-one and inviting the masses to bow before the totem of you. But I’m not.

Perhaps if I adapt Emma’s model to my own situation, I can happily perform again. Take these little artefacts out of their box and put them on show. I can be the curator; no longer the museum piece.

NB. Since we had this conversation, Emma tells me that Flipped Eye Publishing will soon publish her new collection of poems. Proof, if proof were needed, that her dedication to fighting the demon death on the poetry stages of London has not been in vain. Congratulations colleague.

Road Block

2009-03-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Road block
Hit me with a roadblock
Come on a road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Ah! Road block
My, my, my, my, my, my, road block
Up ahead I see a roadblock
Up ahead I see a roadblock
Whoa, road block
Whoa, road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
Road block
(Janis Joplin/Peter Albin, Road Block)

Two nights ago I went dancing. I really hit some major wall. My body was all constricted and I was moving like a cripple (no offence, cripples). I imagined it was a physical manifestation of psychic limitations around wanting to sing and perform my songs. That’s what it felt like. Frustration. Road block. My body screaming to be released. And the dance ended before I got through it. I felt angry.

Yesterday, at the end of a self-hypnosis I went into prolonged involuntary spasming. I was writhing about all over the floor. I have frequently experienced these spasms since I first learned meditation years ago. I went to a class led by an equanimitous Spanish chap who later became a Buddhist monk. "Does that mean you won't be able to...you know...get married," said the middle-aged ladies, mourning Xavier's loss to womankind. The class took place in a brand new community hall on one of the miner's estates on the outskirts of my hometown. Xavier guided we fledgling meditators to bring our attention to different locations in the body, in sequence, to help us to relax. This lasted for about a minute and then we were guided to move our focus to the breath. I soon learned to stay with the body because I liked it better (feeling in depth and detail the whole of your physical being instead of a little tickle of air on the end of your nose). Up till then, I did not know that it was possible to stop the mind’s incessant monologue. Feeling my body for the first time. And resting in it. I was aware of subtle and not so subtle twinges and aches everywhere – but there was pleasure in it because it was new, and my mind was quiet: I wasn’t making more pain by telling myself a story about “I’ve got this pain in my neck/head/toe and it’s not fair.”

The spasms probably look alarming (no-one has seen them), but they feel ecstatic. And afterward I am always rejuvenated. I don’t know the scientific explanation for it because I never bothered to look.

Anyway, I imagined that this was my body finishing off the job started at the dance the other night – coming through that road block. I will perform again. It’s just a matter of time.

Day By Day

2009-03-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Day by day, I'm falling more in love with you
And day by day my love seems to grow
There isn't any end to my devotion
It's deeper dear, by far, than any ocean
(Sammy Cahn/Axel Stordahl/Paul Weston, Day By Day)

In hypnosis prior to sleeping, I asked for the next thing I need to know – woke with the word ‘commitment’ in mind: to commit to bringing this desire of my innermost Self to realisation.
Commitment begins when we are connected to a deep sense of purpose. And then that expresses itself as dedicated action. Day after day.

As soon as I get a chance I will revisit the ‘Logical Levels’ exercise – it’s a great one for giving the mindbody system an experience of what it might feel like if every part of you was aligned to a particular goal. And an experience of that alignment, a sense of it in your mind and body, becomes a memory: something that you can draw on to remind you of what it is you are supposed to be doing. I don't know of a way to conjure up that kind of energy or experience purely by thinking about it. When I first did these kinds of exercises - especially the ones where you mark out spaces on the floor that change your experience as you step from one spot to another - I was amazed. I guess it is as potent as play for children. The unconscious mind knows what to do. You say, "Right, now I am going to step here and become such and such aspect of myself, or such and such perspective on this situation," and you do. It can work like magic.
I seem to be very much a person who experiences the world through his body and emotions, and stepping through these exercises I have experienced some very powerful sensations in my body, plus brighter and clearer images than I am prone to see normally...and of course, my old favourite - the auditory hallucination.

All Together Now

2009-03-25T19:40:00.001-07:00

I think a bit of light relief is in order. I have decided to compile an album track list. The album is a very random collection. Some songs I like and others I don’t. The criterion for inclusion is that a song has been mentioned in this blog. The brightest readers amongst you may have noticed that many of the posts have been titled after some very famous and some not so famous songs. Perhaps I will burn a CD and give it away as a prize. Perhaps not.

Side 1.
1. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John
2. You Get What You Deserve – Big Star
3. Back For Good – Take That
4. Please Mr Postman – The Carpenters
5. Heart of Gold – Neil Young
6. Twinside – The Boo Radleys
7. Breaking Up Is Hard To Do – Neil Sedaka
8. The Boys Are Back In Town – Thin Lizzy
9. I Know There’s An Answer – The Beach Boys
10. Move On Up – Curtis Mayfield
11. Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be – Miriam Karlin and the cast of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be

Side 2.
1. Oh! What A Performance – Nirvana
2. You Give Love A Bad Name – Bon Jovi
3. I’m Down – The Beatles
4. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head – Kylie Minogue
5. Oh No Not My Baby – Fontella Bass
6. Stuck In The Middle With You – Louise
7. Wonderwall – George Harrison
8. Don’t Dream It’s Over – Crowded House
9. Confusion – New Order
10. Making Your Mind Up – Bucks Fizz
11. All Together Now – The Beatles

I’ll return to this post and add songs as we go.

Side 3.
1. Day By Day – The Four Freshmen
2. Road Block – Janis Joplin

Making Your Mind Up

2009-03-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

I asked for a dream, and I got one. I can’t remember it...but I woke mulling over what follows:

When I started this process I thought that there was a deep Authentic part of me jealously hoarding a golden Yes or a leaden No, which I have been digging to discover (and expecting a No for the most part). That initial assumption proved to be true. As I have cleared away layers of outdated beliefs, what was a very complex block with lots of incompatible parts has begun to clarify. I am left now with a simple dichotomy. Both sides are equally true. There is a part of me that wants to record my songs and a part that believes that the task is too large, too expensive in time and money, that my best work is behind me and I’ve left it too late.

Now that I’ve found the answer within, my task is much less mystical. It’s as mundane as making a decision, based on the balance of opposites. I guess either decision will bring benefits.

As I noted in the last post, the unconscious doesn’t always want what’s best for us. It just wants what it wants, and this can be for dysfunctional reasons. A young woman sleeps around because daddy abandoned her as a child. Well, in a way, I guess my songs could feel that I abandoned them. And songs are supposed to be a songwriter’s children, aren’t they?

The unconscious generally gets what it wants. The promiscuous woman usually finds a bedfellow. It seems the decision really is made. It’s good to know that my unconscious mind, my authentic Self, wants to record and perform music. My task is now to get out of the way and let the unconscious have its wicked way. It should be fun.

Lighthearted now.

Confusion

2009-03-25T18:07:00.000-07:00

Where am I? A confusion of thoughts:

1. Performance block. I don’t feel good enough. I don’t practise and I never have. I strum through a few songs now and again and croak along with my out of shape voice.
2. Album block. Now I realise this is a bizarre thought, but the album seems like a strange thing to me. A bunch of songs that often have no greater connection to one another than they were written around the same time. I have often been to a gig and listened to the performer introducing one song after another, and thought how messy it is. “That was one song, now here’s another”. I want to be submerged in an holistic sound world for the duration of the show, not thrust up for air each time the drummer crashes his cymbals at the end of every song! Which is where the idea of writing a musical play came from. To have a unifying narrative...so the songs add up to something more than the sum of their parts. But I scrapped that idea because I couldn’t see a way to make the already written songs relate to the same set of characters (even if, thematically, many of my songs are linked). And I don’t want to write new ones.
3. Dilemma. Is this just an old goal? I want to defeat my demons...but is this the way to do it? Resurrecting a bunch of dusty old tunes and trying to sum up the energy to bring them to life?

The dreams and feelings I have had over the last few weeks show that my heart desires to make music. But why? It has proven to be such a nightmare! In my late teens/early twenties, I attached an awful amount of my self-worth to this ‘being a musician’ - the obsession with Brian Wilson and learning how to do big harmonies and that. However, the obsession paid off, because I did write some beautiful songs and I did learn to arrange music in a unique and rich way. Even when troubled I strove to do something and had several periods of engagement that lasted for quite a while. But the idea that I just need music to give me self esteem is outdated, because I don’t need it for that reason anymore. Yet I am still behaving like someone whose life depends on whether they decide to make a record or not. So why did I get down when I decided to stop? I suppose because the huge emotional investment that I had years ago has gone deep unconscious. The heart wants that desire to be satisfied, whether or not it is practical, possible or useful and relevant to me today.
I am in a double bind. I cannot stop. And I cannot start. I’m still sitting between the fat girl and the thin girl. I have been doing this ‘process’ for months and I’m not sure I’ve moved an inch forward.

Perhaps the way forward is to do some therapeutic process to cleanly remove the unconscious desire to make music? Like people use hypnosis to rid themselves of the unconscious desire to smoke. But music isn’t nicotine. It’s supposed to be a rewarding pastime. Or a passion. Perhaps it’s more like a difficult relationship. If you loved someone in that situation, would you go see a hypnotist to remove your feelings for them? I think you would more likely seek help to sort the relationship out. That would be the more human thing to do.

Don’t Dream It’s Over

2009-03-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

My original interpretation of the Shot Through the Heart dream was clearly wrong. I made a decision based on that interpretation that left me feeling miserable. Dreams have a vital function – to bring to our conscious awareness things that we need to know. This information gives us a wider perspective on our situation and, if acknowledged, can help us to rebalance, to feel equanimity. My unconscious responded to my misinterpretation of the original dream by sending me two more messages: potent dreams that I could not ignore.

Here is a reading of Shot Through the Heart that I am happier with:

The TV presenter was a representation of an unacknowledged desire to perform. This suppressed performer wished to express his feelings to me in non-more-convincing terms: “Don’t stop me from doing what I want to do, because by doing that you are shooting yourself in the heart.”

Do I need to write an interpretation of the Oh No Not My Baby dream? In the spirit of completeness here goes:

My ‘son’ is the universal archetype of the Child – that capacity in each of us for wonder, hope and play. The ‘toys’ I offered to distract the Child represent the alternative ways I can spend my time or express myself. These toys are clearly much inferior as the Child prefers suicide. The dream is telling me that without music, the Child will be unrecognisable as the Child (he will have no head).

Stuck in the Middle with You

2009-03-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

I am talking with two women about women. They ask me about ‘my type’. They are surprised when I say I am fond of a woman with a ‘straight up, straight down’ figure, when earlier I had favoured a woman with ‘meat on her bones’. One of these two women has ‘more meat on her bones’. She gets up from the sofa where both women are sitting and does a little sashay. She sits down again. Swivelling my hips to make space between the two of them, I also sit.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this dream simply means that I am not fussy: fat girls or skinny girls will do. But that’s not what it means. According to Sigmund Freud: “Myths are the dreams of the race; dreams are the myths of the individual.” We can look to the images of world mythology to shed light upon our own small dramas of the early hours. I will talk about the symbolic meaning of women in men’s dreams in another post. Suffice to say, my problem is essentially one of self-expression, communication, my emotional life – and therefore belongs to my ‘feminine aspect’. It makes sense that the dream embodies this dilemma in female flesh. However, the gender of the women is not the most interesting feature of this dream.

Mythical adventures commonly include an episode where the hero has to navigate two equal and opposing forces in order to survive or progress: “Jason sailed through the clashing rocks into a sea of marvels” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p30); Odysseus steers between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis; The Buddha transcends through meditation, the twinned antagonists fear and desire, being and not being; the c19th Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna implores us to have neither likes nor dislikes; and according to Nicholas of Cusa, the very “Wall of Paradise”, (“which conceals God from human sight” (Campbell, p89) and keeps man out of Eden) is built of this “coincidence of opposites” (rather than common or garden redbrick).

So what’s all this got to do with my little three-on-a-couch sex fantasy?

The two women represent the responses I have made so far to my creative block. The thin one (the one without meat on her bones) is the decision I have made to stop, to sever my artistic outlet once and for all. The fuller figured one is bountifulness, fecundity, the muse; she represents my beliefs about the ideal creative situation – the heady inspiration, total commitment and invincible self-belief that I feel I must have before I so much as lift a plectrum. I’ve been swinging between one option and the other – my corpulent muse refused to dance with me, so I decided to throw it all in for a meaner life with her leaner sister.

The message of the dream, then, is to sit down between the two women and wait. And perhaps, like Jason, I will sail on through into that ‘sea of marvels’. The fat girl’s sashay is a little clue that, if I am patient, in time she may dance with me. And to hang in there, refusing to make a decision, refusing action until some ‘third way’ arises, is one definition of genius.

Oh No Not My Baby

2009-03-19T02:32:00.000-07:00

My son, about two years old, with the demeanour of a depressed adult, is sitting in the second floor window. I take him out of the window and place him in the middle of the room, amongst some toys. He returns to the window seat and falls out backwards. It seems like a deliberate act. I run down to the yard and my parents join me. We wail. My son’s head is missing. It has disintegrated on impact.

And I went to bed feeling ok.

NB. This son was simply a dream symbol. I don’t have a son.

Can't Get You Out of My Head

2009-03-18T14:44:00.001-07:00

I chat to my colleague, Emma. Tell her that I’m jacking in the music.

“I thought you were heading that way,” says Emma. “Shame.”

“Why?”

“Completion.”

“But that’s not a very good reason for me to do something today – to finish something that I didn’t finish yesterday,” I say, probably a bit defensively. And then something along these lines: “It would require a lot of effort and passion. And tying up loose ends could never be enough motivation. Any results would be drab as hell.”

Lots of people have encouraged me to ‘get the stuff out there’, because they believe in the songs. But how much can it really mean to them? Not enough to motivate me, for sure. The conversation has confused me, though. Thought I had made a decision and now the whole bloody dialogue is opening up in my head again: why should a little bit of external validation get me doubting my decision?

I'm down (I'm really down)

2009-03-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

“The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Pretty blue. It’s a bit like a break-up. There is a period of grieving! The last couple of days I have felt bereft. There is no meat on my cold bones. I guess there has to be a period of adjustment. I was writing songs and making music for a long time.

Shot Through the Heart! (And Norton's to blame)

2009-03-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

I dive for the gun, but the celebrity off TV gets there first. I am lying at his feet. I get to my knees. He wastes no time in aiming the pistol and shooting me three times through the heart.

I wake and am surprised that I feel absolutely serene.

Over the last week, I haven’t made the connection between my purpose in life and music that I thought was the final piece in the jigsaw. Betty couldn’t achieve the impossible. The part of me that was attached to the idea of performing music has been put to death. The feeling of serenity marks the end of the struggle.

I see the whole thing now as an illusion. I had fallen under a spell. Of course, I couldn’t get on and do it, because it isn’t me anymore. Being a bedroom genius was my way of giving my existence some kind of merit, when, years ago, I couldn’t locate my worth as a human being anywhere else. Ah well.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!

Cowboys, cuckolds and cadavers

2009-03-17T03:35:00.000-07:00

I talk with my friend Angus about what it would be like to sit in a theatre box and watch the songs being performed in a show. That distance removes the pressure. Which is useful, because I feel inadequate as a performer. I never practise.

We talk about writing a musical. I feel enthusiastic. I get to stay off stage and still have my music heard. Perhaps the overarching purpose I have been looking for is ‘storytelling’. I have loved myths and fairy tales since childhood. A couple of years ago I developed the concept for a concept album: twelve songs that told a kind of metaphysical story. And this blog is telling a kind of metaphysical story too. Perhaps I can resurrect that concept album idea, and bring in colour, dancing and character!

We discuss set design, choreography and plot. But there is something not quite right. I don’t want to write any more songs unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’m done with writing songs. I am just looking for a vehicle to purge myself of all these old ones. By the end of the day I am feeling more conflicted: writing a play around a bunch of already written songs is a dumb idea. Thematically, the songs are definitely linked – I have a couple of pet subjects that I return to again and again. And yet the content of the words is specific enough to make the whole idea unworkable. I can’t see a way to cram cowboys, cuckolds and cadavers onto the same stage.

What a performance

2009-03-17T03:10:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I saw Scott Walker’s harrowing songs from Tilt and The Drift being performed at the Barbican by artists including some operatic tenors, Dot Allison, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker. Apparently, Scott was overseeing from behind the mixing desk. He famously doesn’t dig performing onstage, but clearly still wants to be heard.

I used to suffer from stage fright to the point where I would rather die than have a go at Karaoke. I solved it years ago, using a technique I read in a book. But still, I don’t feel like a performer – getting onstage feels futile. Why would I do that? For fun? To entertain? Some would recommend that ‘getting out there and doing it’ is a means to rediscover one’s purpose. I’ve tried that. The result: a handful of gigs here and there. Perhaps I will get onstage again, but I need to feel the drive to do it first. Otherwise, the performance is unconvincing: the audience are unconvinced, and I am less convinced than ever.

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be

2009-03-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

Have you read Ian Macdonald’s essay in Revolution in the Head, about the decline of ‘our’ culture in the latter third of the C20th century (where he identifies The Beatles as the last gasp of the western soul)? When I read it years ago, I sympathised with Macdonald’s view, and could accept much of his thesis. Perhaps it’s not entirely irrelevant that MacDonald later committed suicide. It’s probably healthier not to believe that art is entirely dead on a global scale. How about on a (very) local scale? Is my art entirely dead? I am all fired up about my new career: enabling people with significant mental health issues to pursue creative pursuits if they choose to do so. Why can’t I permit that same understanding and sponsorship of my own creative designs?

I remember a time when the wish to express something universal through the prism of my own experience (i.e. to make records) was a pressing and vital (albeit thwarted) urge. If that was true yesterday, why not today? Can I reconnect?

After the Logical Levels exercise (Move On Up), I was dissatisfied with the way my guide appeared to make assumptions about what my responses meant. And I felt like my refusal to give to myself the very thing I valued for other people was key, and should not have been dismissed. I was pissed off, and the strength of the emotion told me that something deeper than my ego had been hurt.

Betty Erickson has helped me discover practical resources like motivation, budget management and to get what feels like eight hours rejuvenating sleep in four – perhaps she can help me with something a little more esoteric. Over the last week I’ve been using the following (necessarily convoluted) self-hypnosis script to see if my unconscious is indeed hoarding my lost artistic purpose and to ask for it back, please:

“I am going into self-hypnosis for ten minutes for the purpose of allowing my unconscious mind to make the adjustments that are appropriate to assist me in rediscovering my purpose in making music and when I’m finished I’m going to feel [whatever I want to feel on that particular day].”

Ooh Betty! (Erickson)

2009-03-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader, if you try just one of the exercises from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road?’...make it Betty Erickson’s self-hypnosis technique, which is the subject of today’s post. THE easiest and most effective self-hypnosis technique I’ve ever tried – and I’ve tried a few. The added bonus is that the information you need to try it out is right here, and it’s free.

Self-hypnosis usually involves taking yourself into a trance state while simultaneously maintaining enough conscious attention to give yourself suggestions/visualisations appropriate to what you want to achieve. That may require buying a book or a CD or attending a seminar and doing a lot of practise. This technique sidesteps all of that. You state your desired outcome (in a very specific linguistic format) while awake, and then go easily into a deeply relaxed state by doing a straightforward mental exercise (seeing an image, hearing a sound and feeling a feeling). While you’re doing that, your unconscious mind is running in the background, working out how to meet your request for more motivation, increased confidence or better sleep (or whatever).

It works. I have been trialling Betty each day for the last month. A statistical analysis of my daily task list for the previous month and the current month shows that I get just under twice as much done these days. Over the years I have tried a million and one ways of increasing my productivity – to little avail. My getting-it-done muscle started out puny and atrophied out of existence. Without exaggeration, Betty has been a genuinely life-changing discovery. I passed her on to several friends: each has been surprised and impressed with the ease of the technique and its effectiveness.

This blog has largely been about trusting unconscious wisdom to find solutions to problems that fox cognitive intelligence and tie one up in (il)logical knots. Betty takes that trust a stage further, operating completely outside of consciousness. You won’t know what hit you. A bit like the Manchurian candidate.

I exhort you to do a Betty today!

Move On Up

2009-03-02T03:07:00.000-08:00

I have made a decision to make an album over the next 12 months. However, something is missing. It still feels like a chore. Even though no parts apparently object, I seem to be lacking a part that is salivating after the challenge. No internal cheerleader.

The following exercise, called ‘Logical Levels’ is pretty simple. You mark out six spaces on the floor, which supposedly correspond to escalating ‘levels’ of mental abstraction. Then you step into each space in sequence, asking relevant questions as you go. The exercise is intended to bring various psychic contents into alignment, enabling the 'explorer' to pinpoint at what ‘level’, if any, change is needed. Change at a higher level is likely to influence all of the lower levels.
I’ve been on a coaching course and took the opportunity to work with a partner, who I will call S.

Environment. Where? When? With Whom? What are the external influences?
I’m making a record in a studio. I can see it, but it feels unreal. We move on.

Behaviour. What? What do you do in this context?
I’m selecting songs and writing new ones. Then, I’m singing and recording. (At this point I’m feeling pretty negative) “Things would be much cleaner without this in my life.”
S: “It’s an identity thing?” S suggests we move straight on to the Identity space, as she has inferred that is where my block resides. She may be right, but it’s an assumption. In retrospect, I would have insisted that we go through the spaces in sequence.

Capabilities. How? How do you go about doing things? What are your capabilities, skills, strategies?
Bypassed.

Beliefs and values. Why? Why do you do something? Why is it important?
Bypassed.

Identity. Who? Who are you?
Stepping into ‘Identity’, I feel I am wearing a concrete cloak: my body is being compressed from above. Not so encouraging. The dilemma, or the thought of making a record is burdensome to who I am now.
Then, spontaneously, my posture raises up and I feel a powerful casting off of the load. “I CAN do this. Fuck it. I can just do this.”
S. isn’t sold on my sudden transformation. I guess she suspects it’s the ego reasserting itself: wishful thinking. We move on.

Purpose (sometimes called ‘Spirituality’). For whom? Your connection to a larger system (community or cosmos).
Nothingness. I feel empty and no image, symbol or sound comes into consciousness. Like I'm flailing around in airless space. Cannot sense where making music has value for me. It’s just product. That’s how I’m thinking of records these days. I’d be just another ego pushing its tawdry shtick.

Earlier in the day, I mentioned to S another project – my intention to train as a recovery worker in rehab. S suggests we run through the Logical Levels again. In sharp contrast to the laboured exercise we had just endured, I zip through the levels with a growing sense of motivation and joy. At the capability level, I feel compassion, presence, engagement. At the beliefs level I become emotional: “People should have the opportunity to lead lives worth living. I can help them a few steps along the road.” At the purpose level I talk about supporting people as they actualize themselves. An element of the work will be facilitating creative projects (art, crafts, music etc). I talk about people having the opportunity to enjoy creativity and to see where it leads. My state is very different to the nothingness I felt a few minutes ago. But I am immediately aware of the irony. I want to give to others what at this moment, I seem unable to give to myself: creativity, self-expression, self-actualization through art.

I Know There’s An Answer

2009-03-01T17:20:00.001-08:00

I know so many people who think they can do it alone
They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones.
Now what can you tell them?
And what can you say that won't make them defensive?

I know there's an answer
I know now but I had to find it by myself. (B.Wilson/T.Sachen/M.Love)

Today I have been dwelling on how finding time to do music is going to require a lot of discipline and some creative time management. And what will it cost me elsewhere? If I threw my computer and instruments in a skip...could I invest the saved energy in a more routinely rewarding career – more money; more security; my own place to live? You know; those things that other people have?

The post ‘Resolving Internal Conflict’ from back in November 2008 contains a full description of each step in the following exercise.

Identify the parts involved in the conflict. Reality and responsibility vs. the desire to make music.
Build a clear representation of the first part. In a suit(!) getting on with my life.
Build a clear representation of the second part. Onstage playing a guitar
Associate with the first part and find its positive intention. To invest my time and energy wisely.
Associate with the other part and find its positive intention. To be the best I can be, by doing something with the songs I have written and continue to write.
Negotiate. What do the parts think of each other?
Suit me says “the one with me playing the guitar doesn’t feel like me.”
Guitar me says “It’s just fear that gets in the way.”
What do they learn from each other?
Suit: To give myself some slack – allow myself to do what I could enjoy.
Guitar: The message is a caution – to take it seriously - do the preparation, approach it in a professional way, make it a practise.
At this point my hands move closer together.
Suit: Haven’t you had enough time to prepare? How often do you pick up a guitar to rehearse? How often do you warm up your voice to sing properly?
Guitar: We haven’t got started.

As I type the last statement of my ‘musician part’ I feel a real sense of the desperation of it. We haven’t got started, at 33. Perhaps it is time for me to take a dose of reality. I am 33 years old and I have a daughter who has recently turned 3. What do I want to teach her? To give up? To turn away from the troublesome parts of yourself? The other part of me believes that the brave and adult thing to do would be to decide to stop.

Take a meta-view. Back in the process, I step out of the negotiation to an ‘objective’ point of view. I see that the ‘musician part’ of me doesn’t want to give up. It’s really hanging in there for a solution, to get its way, to make a record. And the new adversary, the latest version of the block is my ‘reality part’ – which thinks I should get a proper job. Is there a way that both of these goals can be satisfied? A compromise: set a deadline of 12 months to record a broadcast standard album (not just a bunch of half-arsed demos). The best way to find out if you want to do something is to do it. At the end of 12 months, album in hand, I can assess if I want to continue to write and record, or do other things. And I can afford to ‘waste’ 12 months, can’t I?
I check to see if there are any other parts which object to this agreement, and there aren’t...
Integrate. My hands move together.
Future pace. So I have my answer. Do I want to make music?

“We’ll see.”

The Boys Are Back In Town

2009-03-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

Cut off one hydra’s head...and two grow in its place.

I’ve used the Resolving Internal Conflict exercise a number of times because it’s a simple and effective way to transcend a dichotomy. And that’s what this whole process seems to be about. I guess the conflict I am dealing with is more complex than simply “should I or shouldn’t I?” I clear one element of it, only to see it resurface in a new form. Perhaps there is a technique out there for resolving complex conflicts in one fell swoop? But I don’t know it yet. So I continue to swipe my way through the undergrowth one stroke at a time.

The following post will describe my next swipe at Resolving Internal Conflict.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2009-02-28T16:01:00.000-08:00

In several posts I have talked about ‘parts’. And the need to integrate these parts. It’s familiar to conventional speech to say “one part of me wants to do one thing and one part of me wants to do another.” Science is now providing more compelling explanations of why this division is a very real part of human experience.

My preferred explanations come from theories of the brain’s evolution and also from what I will call (and I’ve never thought about what to call it before) ‘parts theory’. The latter is a familiar concept to hypnotherapists. The former says that human volition is often haphazard because different layers of the brain, performing different functions, developed at different stages of evolutionary history. Psychologist Jonathon Haidt gives a good explanation of this in his book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’. In brief: newer layers evolved as ‘add-ons’ but the new circuits were not integrated with the old, and the old continued to function in the same way as ever. The most significant split appears to be that between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. The ego evolved because it gave man the glorious or dubious advantage of experiencing himself as an individual entity in time and therefore for planning ahead. Unfortunately, the ancient unconscious (which has gone through many millions of years of product cycles, and therefore runs much more efficiently than the ‘beta’ conscious mind) often has instincts, beliefs and behaviours which run counter to the ego’s best laid plans. Add to this Western culture’s one-eyed worship of the rational mind and ignorance and misunderstanding of the function of all that is unconscious, and you have a recipe for the personal, societal and environmental horrors that we see unfolding around us. Some have been aware of this fundamental split in man’s identity for a long time: it’s the real (metaphorical) meaning of the Adam and Eve myth, the so-called ‘Fall of Man’; this departure of the individual from the Garden of his own deeper Self and of Nature. True.

Parts theory suggests that we learn a behaviour at some point in our lives which serves a useful purpose. This, like anything we learn, becomes after a series of repetitions, an habituated behaviour – it is unconscious, and in normal circumstances, we are no longer able to consciously control it and often are not even aware that we do it. Even though consciously we would rather we didn’t do it, we still do it and we don’t know why. E.g. smoking; having silly arguments with our spouse; arriving late for appointments; procrastinating due to fear of failure.

The previous posts (Core Transformation and Been a Miner for a Heart of Gold) detail a humane approach to honouring these parts for their good intentions and transforming or releasing them from performing their obsolete duties.

Twinside

2009-02-28T15:46:00.000-08:00

It thinks it's right when it knows it's wrong
It's been like this right from day one...
And I know that I can't make up my mind
I can feel it there's two of me inside, twinside Martin Carr/The Boo Radleys, Twinside

Last year I had the experience of playing guitar and singing with Martin Carr, formerly of the Boo Radleys. I saw evidence of the strange effect that someone’s fame can have on other people. On a few occasions strangers approached him and said odd things: non-sequiturs and mild sycophancy. I even did a bit of it myself (not the sycophancy – it’s impossible to be in awe of Martin if you spend more than a minute with him – he is the most self-deprecating and down-to-earth man you could meet). Visiting my home town, I mentioned to an old friend that I was playing a gig in Cardiff with Martin’s band. My friend said, “Never heard of him.” I said, “You know, The Boo Radleys...Wake up it’s a beautiful morning.” “No mate, doesn’t ring any bells.” It was odd because this friend was a hardcore music fan, obsessed with Britpop at the time: and probably still listening to his Oasis and The Verve records. And of course he knew exactly who I was talking about: turns out he’d been discussing it with a mutual friend the night before. Such is the strange power of celebrity to make people act in unbecoming ways. Perhaps being famous is akin to paranoia – more people know you than you know people, they treat you differently and they expect something from you that you’re ill-equipped to give.

I’m not interested in the trappings of fame, then. So, why the attachment to success that I worked through in the last process?
Rather than a motivation toward success, I was carrying a motivation away from failure, or more accurately, of being seen to fail. A motivation away from making records, hiring a band, playing gigs only to be rewarded with the scant recognition that is afforded to countless ‘local musicians’, with ideas and expectations that perhaps exceed their talent. Terrified of becoming some weatherbeaten troubadour, cycling round the open mic spots, fast approaching middle age: “Lord, spare me the ignominy of being seen to be desperate: I’m not.” And being described by my smug Britpop-loving friend as someone who “doesn’t ring any bells.”

You do it only because you love it and you want to be absorbed in it; stretching yourself as a writer. Have I got another one in me? And another? And you want people to hear it, because there is something in it, something in you...and people respond to that something. But the paradox is, if you do it and there is little recognition...even if recognition wasn’t your motivation – the fact that you didn't get any sends a message. On average, artists die significantly younger than scientists. The reason? Scientists know that if they achieve something worthwhile, sooner or later, their efforts will be recognised and rewarded. The same cannot always be said for artists.

I know that the beliefs outlined above are so much bullshit. As are many of the beliefs that I have discovered and attempted to change throughout this process. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. And that’s the point.

Been a Miner for a Heart of Gold

2009-02-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

I want to live,I want to give
I've been a miner for a heart of gold
It's these expressions I never give
That keep me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old. Neil Young, Heart of Gold

My Core Transformation process:

Problem part: Overly concerned with success/failure. This occurs when I think about recording. I experienced this part as a sharp throb in my left cheekbone.

Chain of desired outcomes: 1. Success 2. Letting go of the need for success (I want success so I can let go of the need for it!) 3. Release of tension in my body 4. To touch life with a lighter touch 5. Plasticity (no idea what that means...these answers just popped up as words in my awareness as I asked the questions) 6. Awe 7. (Core State) Oneness with the source of that awe.

Experiencing the Core State and carrying it back down through the chain of desired outcomes: You had to be there.

How old is the part? 12 yrs.

Bring the part fully into your body. Very nice, except the part would not radiate through the right half of my body as intensely as the left.

Any objections? Yes. I felt a pulsing in my inside ankle, left leg. I checked 3 times if this really was an objection, and the pulsing intensified each time.

Chain of desired outcomes for the objecting part: 1. Success (We want the same thing, we dream the same dream) 2. Wealth (who knew?) 3. Freedom 4. Time/Nowness 5. “Om” (chuckle) 6. (Core State) Beingness.

Experiencing the Core State and carrying it back down through the chain of desired outcomes: 6. The ankle pulsed like crazy 5. Deep silence 4. Sense of enormous spaciousness 3. Floating away 2. Started laughing (“I’ve got everything I need”) 1. More laughter. Original context: I experience my body very 3-Dimensionally and saw the most sensitive points plotted like stars in space. Cosmic.

How old? 14

This time I was able to bring the part fully into my body and the original part too.

No more objections.

Timeline generalization. Whizzing through my life with Awe and Beingness was quite a motivating experience.

After doing the exercise, I felt quite tranced out, and comfortable with the notion of trying and failing and of being seen to fail. What of it?

We shall see if anything really changes in due course.

Core Transformation

2009-02-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

Ok. Where am I? Aware that somehow my unconscious beliefs around success and failure have been getting in my way.

I decided to use a process called Core Transformation (created by Connirae Andreas) as a way of...well...transforming this unconscious attachment to success into something more useful. I recommend this one. If nothing else, it can be a tremendously pleasurable experience.

How it works:
You identify the unconscious part of you that is creating the difficulty. You invite it to communicate with you in consciousness. You ask it what it wants and then, what it wants by wanting what it wants, until eventually you arrive at a ‘Core State’. This is usually something pretty cosmic, like ‘Being’, ‘Love’ (in the ‘All You Need is Love’ sense of the word) or ‘Oneness’. Apparently, all of our behaviours and efforts in life are a means to these sorts of ends. Unfortunately, we sometimes go about achieving these emotional states in dysfunctional, laborious and essentially doomed ways.

Once you have identified the Core State, you invite your ‘part’ to experience the Core State right now, instead of pursuing the chain of wants that you have discovered. Then, you reexperience each of the desired wants in reverse order, and see how they are transformed or enriched by having the Core State as a way of being. And the same for the original context that was causing the issue.

Then, you ask the part to identify its age (the behaviours often belong to younger, immature parts of yourself – most often dating from childhood) and invite the part to grow up to your current age.

Then, you invite the part to flow fully in and throughout your body.

You then you reexperience each of the desired outcomes and the original context, in reverse order, this time with the grown up part, fully in your body.

Then you check to see if there are any other parts of your neurology that object to you having this Core State as a way of being in the world. If there are, you do the whole process with each one.

And finally, you take all the parts through what is called a ‘Timeline Generalization’. You whizz through your past and out into your future, colouring or enriching your unconscious mental representation of your lifetime with the Core State.

Disclaimer: Most of the processes in this blog so far seem to have come from either Mr Andreas or Mrs. Andreas or the two of them together. I want to reassure the reader that I’m not on a commission. I guess you pick up one book by an author and that leads you to another. There are lots of good writers in this field who aren’t called Andreas – perhaps we’ll get to some of them later.

Wait a Minute, Mr Postman

2009-02-25T05:07:00.000-08:00

My intention in these posts has been twofold. To work through my own block while simultaneously laying out the procedures for each of the therapeutic processes, as a kind of tutorial. This has led to some overlong posts. I’m going to try separating the two. I’ll do paired posts at each stage: one will be a description of what I have discovered in my personal quest; the other will be the steps of the therapeutic process I used.

The Secret of My Success (Part Two)

2009-02-23T14:23:00.000-08:00

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge

So, I answered Gita’s question, (see previous post) and Gita responded with this:

Ok, I am interested in why you have to "deserve" something, rather than pursuing, enjoying, messing around with....etc?

Songwriting and recording was some kind of higher purpose, to do with getting beyond myself and reaching out to people. So I had this purpose, but for some reason I didn’t fulfil it. And I guess unconsciously I began to feel like I didn’t deserve it; that I wasn’t worthy of it...because I wasn’t getting it done.

So why do I have to deserve it? Because you can’t have something that you feel you don’t deserve (think lottery winners who spend themselves poor in twelve months or anyone who self-sabotages).
For one part of me, making music was my life purpose, and for another part – I felt like I didn’t deserve to think of myself as a real musician – I believed that in a parallel universe I was a genius, but in this universe, my songs wouldn’t even make sense to people. I was wrong about that. But it’s no surprise that my progress was slow to nil. I was split right down the middle.

Which is why I couldn’t simply ‘pursue, enjoy or mess around' with music. This constant battle was going on in my head: making music was life or death. I felt that I was too good to do it just for enjoyment’s sake...but success (in terms of selling records/making a living from music) seemed a distant and unlikely possibility. I was simultaneously too good and not good enough: a classic schizoid tendency. Yikes.

Several years ago, when I made the decision to stop permanently, I took on the belief that there was no significance whatsoever in whether anyone ever heard the songs that I had written or not: there were plenty of other songs for people to listen to. Success became much more to do with being a good person and helping others in more tangible ways.

The fear of starting to make music again, then, is the fear of unleashing that demon: the one that demands recognition, and sucks all the blood out of doing it, pursuing it, enjoying it. Even now, as I write this, there is a vague story running in my head about a guy who overcomes the odds and self-coaches his way to the Mercury Music Prize. And in answer to that, all the old and new barriers real and imagined: age, confidence, beauty, the music industry, no-one buys records anymore, where am I going to find a band who will play what they are told without getting paid? How demoralising it might be to think, that, even if this process achieves a positive outcome, and I make a great record, the most that may come of it is I play a few gigs and a few more people come up to me and say, “I really liked your song,” or “You have a beautiful voice,” or “Have you got a MySpace?”
Much safer to find one’s fulfilment in ways that are not measured by chart position.

So there you have it: little more than good old fashioned fear of failure. Shit.

Thanks for your questions, Gita. I think I answered them.

The Secret of My Success

2009-02-22T16:04:00.000-08:00

I got an email from my friend Gita (whose name means ‘song’). Gita is a musician. She plays violin and flute and for a couple of years has trained to sing operatic arias. Gita says, “I definitely think of myself as a musician - more so now than ever before - because it's what I do for myself. It doesn't matter whether I perform or not. But I definitely need to practice regularly. It's the creativity and being absorbed that's so fulfilling.” Gita was interested in why I talked about being “a successful musician” when asking myself questions, way back in post 7.

Gita: What is success, or what would it be for you to be successful?

I do satisfy my own definition of success. I have various goals that I am progressing toward. Success is all about progress for me: it’s not where you’re from. It’s not where you’re at. It’s not even where you’re headed, particularly. It’s whether you’re moving or not.
So it is interesting that I phrased the question "Do I deserve to be a successful musician?" rather than just "Do I deserve to be a musician?" Your question has thrown up the idea of doing music for what it provides in and of itself. Years ago, my friend Toby told me (with some emphasis) that I should just do it for fun or I would end up not doing it at all. He was right.

On the other hand, find me someone who is writing a novel who doesn’t want to see it published?

The Big Nod

2009-02-21T18:10:00.001-08:00

I discovered a book by Steve Andreas, one of the more down-to-earth and humane communicators in the coaching field. The book is called “Transforming Your Self – Becoming who you want to be”. Which I admit, isn’t the most down-to-earth title for a book I’ve ever seen. But it’s certainly humane.
There is a lot of useful information in this book, centring on the technique of changing how you view aspects of your self-concept in your mind. It is apparently straightforward to bring these normally unconscious images into consciousness, and then change them.

The chapter on the “Not Self” seems to be the most relevant, in light of the feeling that ‘I do not deserve’ and that ‘I am not a musician’.
The approach is to loosen up the belief about not being something or not having a certain quality by asking a particular type of question.

Andreas: “What experiences and beliefs underlie your expectation of not having a sense of [deserving to be a musician] in the future?”

Are you ready for this?

1. That I haven’t committed my ‘time’ to it yet.
2. That I cannot just pick up any instrument and play any style.
3. That I’m not a great piano player.
4. That I get a doom feeling whenever I play or sing: “Not good enough. Not gonna make it. Failure. Fraud.”
5. I don’t know anything about gear or own very much.
6. When I write songs at the piano recently, there is an unusually high incidence of 70s balladeer type major 7 chord progressions and most of the melodies that pop into my head when I am out and about are folky modal melodies – and these aren’t what I want to write!
7. My recorded vocals have rarely been as good as I would like them to be.
8. That if I write something which does not follow my own fairly strict rules of counterpoint I feel like it isn’t really music even though nobody else in the world gives a fuck about counterpoint.
9. I have lost my love of listening to music.

Questions (and answers):
1. You haven’t committed any time to it yet? Well, I have put a LOT of time in to making music, writing songs and worrying about it over the years. It hasn’t been constant for any sustained period, that’s all.
2. Are there any other musicians anywhere who specialize with one instrument in one style? I guess so. I write music for a lot of instruments that I can’t play (strings, horns, woodwind etc). I’m a composer/arranger.
3. Does every songwriter play piano to concert standard? Could you use piano just to find some new and interesting chord changes? No. Yes.
4. How do you get that doom feeling? Do you make comparisons with other musicians or with what you ‘should’ be able to do? Do you know of any methods to change this doom feeling for something more resourceful? Yes. An exercise called the Swish. And the Perspective pattern described in Transforming Your Self.
5. Does every songwriter/musician know lots about guitars and amplifiers? Where do people pick up that knowledge? Experience, gigging, rehearsals, being with other musicians. Have you gigging and rehearsal experience? A little but not much: I avoided getting involved in a lot of things or I started and didn’t stick at them. Also, being a Luddite has been part of my self-image: “I’m an artist, not a technician.” Do you own any gear at all? Yes, an electro-acoustic guitar, an electric piano (it smells nice), a decent mic with a stand, a Juno synthesizer (a loan from a friend who I have lost touch with), a PC built for home recording with sequencing and sampler software, monitor speakers, industry standard headphones, a digital four track with built in analogue synth and sampler; various percussion instruments.
6. Have you been through periods before when you wrote songs that weren’t the ones you wanted to write? Yes. It tends to come in cycles. You just have to keep going till you hit a good patch again. Actually, the folky ones are often pretty good. I should stop using the stand-up piano in the living room. It has a tendency to make everything sound quasi-jazz because it needs tuning!
7. How did you go about recording vocals that didn’t do you justice as a singer? I dreaded it, put off setting up the mic. I didn’t warm up; I imagined having the opportunity to replace the takes at a later date. How did that make you feel? Dreadful. My voice would not be in peak condition. I remember recording a few songs a line at a time. As melodramatic as it may sound, I did not have the energy to sing. I guess it is some kind of testament to my determination to get something on tape; to express something. Would you approach it that way now? No. I feel good about life.
8. How would it be if you wrote music without thinking about counterpoint? Nice, but I’m not sure how I would do that yet. How many ways can you think of right now to do it? I could record chords and vocals as soon as a song is written, and then demo all of the other parts immediately. I could scat the parts off the top of my head. I could set a deadline on working up each arrangement. Why haven’t you done that yet? I’ve tried...but the counterpoint obsession creeps back in. I could ignore it, if I decided to – I know that it is counterproductive (no pun intended).
9. How specifically have you lost your love of listening? I guess every time I hear a record I am listening to it analytically. And if I can’t hear all the parts, it frustrates me, and I listen over until I can. When I hear a new record, I can hear whether it is great or not, whether it is ‘authentic’ or not, whether it once would have moved me – but I often don’t have much of an emotional response to it. The magic is gone. I respond a lot more to music that I don’t know very well – music that is in very different genres from pop songs – the things that I write. Does that give you an idea how you can rediscover the joy of listening to music? Yes.

The result of this question and answer session being that when I ask myself the question “Do I deserve to be a musician?” I get the answer “Yes.” (big nod). “Do I deserve to be a successful musician?” “Yes.” And I can pick up a guitar without the doom feeling. A more radical result than I expected.
“Transforming Your Self” has a lot of information on how I may build upon and ‘solidify’ this new feeling of deservingness. For the moment I am satisfied with the big nod.

Back For Good

2009-02-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

I've been away for a while. The festive season and being away from the computer meant I got behind with the blog (excuses excuses). I have, however continued with 'the process'. Over the next few days I will endeavour to bring the posts up to date. As I know that you, my prodigious band of readers, is eager to know what's bin goin' on.

Back on the Horse (and Coach)

2008-12-03T15:21:00.000-08:00

I got off track there. Did you spot it?

In post 7 I dredged up an unconscious belief that I don’t deserve to consider myself a musician, successful or not. Common sense tells me that carrying a belief like that has to be a significant part of the problem I have been exploring. Yet, rather than deal with that, in post 8 I recorded an attempt to coach myself to coach myself less! Avoiding something? Like the only thing that has stopped me from getting started these last three months (a period where I have had more than enough time and a pretty good external reason to demo some songs) is that I have been doing a bit of self-coaching. It’s pretty clear there’s more to it than that.

That declaration “I am not a musician” felt like something of a commandment from the depth of my being - quite perturbing. For a moment, I felt, “That’s it then. There’s my answer.” I’ve certainly cocked a deaf ear to an intuitive voice in the past, and lived to regret it. On the other hand, Carl Jung (the great psychologist and cartographer of the unconscious mind) said that such messages should be taken as information rather than absolute truth.

What was the message here? What did this Voice-of-Doom wish to bring to my attention? Perhaps that I was trying to solve a belief level problem at the level of behaviour. In other words, getting my guitar out and just ‘getting on with it’ is not the basic solution I have been looking for. Not yet. I need to tackle the self-doubt, the lack of a sense of ‘deserving’ first.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

The goose that wouldn’t lay

2008-11-30T15:45:00.000-08:00

Songwriting was a kind of therapy. From time to time some clear note bubbled up out of the mess of my life, and became a luminescent song. I lived in its glow for a few days or a week (My Ship is Coming In, Baby Baby), then to sink back under the Slough of Despond until god-knew-when. I remember black black nights of despair, vowing to myself that this was enough now: I would rise the next day and start work on The Album. But there would be some other problem awaiting me in the morning. As therapy, songwriting wasn’t reliable or far-reaching enough.

I went looking for something that really did work – something that would help me to feel better and to live better. I tried a few things, met with some limited success (usually followed by a period of evangelism), and then once more, succumbed to the weight of a life in an advanced state of disrepair. Yet I never gave up.
Earlier this year I learned a raft of therapy skills. And the results have been lasting and pervasive. What can I tell you? I am in the process of changing career, finding a job which fits with me for almost the first time in my life; I have changed aspects of my personal life that weren’t working for ones that are; and in ways that I won’t attempt to explain here, I have ‘found myself’. I am happy.

All that is good preparation. There is still a distance to go, not least around execution. A friend once said that I would read the manual before switching on a television set. To be fair to myself, I’ve been in no great hurry: I’ve just been enjoying doing the laundry. But how crisp does my shirt need to be? Perhaps now is the time to stop ironing out the creases. Perhaps now is the time to tackle my productivity block head on by setting up a microphone and restringing my guitar.

* * * * * * * * *

I decided to do a Resolving Internal Conflict exercise to integrate the desire for preparation with the need for action – a process to wean me off ‘processes’ (Isn’t it ironic – dontcha think?).

See post 5 for a full explanation of the exercise. In summary, I came to understand on a feeling level what I already knew intellectually: that fattening one’s golden goose is most worthwhile if one allows the goose to lay from time to time, and that the real learning comes with the action rather than the preparation. I felt pretty good.

And yet, as I completed the exercise, a Voice-from-Within said with authority: “I am not a musician.”

You get what you deserve

2008-11-26T15:37:00.000-08:00

The Resolving Internal Conflict process described in post 5 allowed my conscious awareness to access beliefs and feelings that had previously been unavailable to it: that was the point of the process. The sustained inward focus had brought me into a light hypnotic trance – I thought it might be useful to stay there for a while to ask my unconscious a direct question.

“Do I deserve to be a successful musician?”

“No.” (my head shook involuntarily from side to side. I mentioned in post 5 that some people can be surprised that the unconscious can communicate in a physical way like this. But it’s not that surprising – who decides to open your eyes each morning?)

I asked some more:

“Am I worthy of the best in life?”

“Yes.” (head nodded in an exaggerated way)

“Am I worthy of success?”

“Yes.”

I don’t deserve to be successful, yet I am worthy of success. Ask me another.

“I don’t deserve...(Yes)...to be successful because of something I did?”

“No.” Yet the word ‘guilt’ popped up.

“I don’t deserve to be a successful musician because of something I didn’t do?”

“Yes.”

“Do I deserve to be a musician?”

“No.”

“Am I worthy of being a musician?”

“Yes.”

I was perplexed. What is the difference between deserving something and being worthy of it? My unconscious mind clearly understands them as quite different things.

I asked myself consciously “What is a person worth?” and “What does a person deserve?” And the distinction became clear: ‘worth’ is unconditional, something that we all have by virtue of just being here; deserving, however, is conditional – connected to receiving reward for having served well.

And I do not feel that I have served well.

How much backstory do I need to write here? In twelve words or less:

lost years clinical depression bipolar swings erratic efforts stillborn ideas better now

So I find myself in a bit of a catch-22: I don’t feel like I ‘deserve’ to be called musician because I haven’t put the time in. And I’m not putting the time in because I don’t feel like I deserve to be called musician. How does that work? Because feeling that you deserve something is absolutely essential to motivation: you say to yourself “This is mine”, and you go out and get it.

I have been saying to myself “This isn’t mine.”

Silent Music

2008-11-23T16:01:00.000-08:00

Several readers have fed back to me “I think you should continue to make music,” or “I don’t think you can stop.” Words to that effect.
If I really was making music, then there wouldn’t be a problem.
Today I filed something in the Bisley cabinet – in the Ideas drawer. It was the chords, melody and bassline for a song with an ABCD structure. Just placeholder lyrics at the moment. That overflowing drawer is part of the problem – a great weight of silent music and will it ever get recorded?
I think I am probably starting as many songs as I ever did. Fewer get as far as a lyric. But the real problem is that I rarely commit them to tape.
When I thought to turn my coaching process into a regular blog, I was excited by the idea - more excited than I can remember feeling about making music in a long time. A fairly clear signal that I ought to jack in music and devote my creative energies to writing - perhaps become a professional blogger.
So why does that not seem like an easy thing to do? Perhaps you have known a malevolent drunk who was so charming and gentle when sober that it broke your heart to turn your back on him? Did you ever stay in a trainwreck relationship because, beneath all of the layers of incompatibility, there was a connection that you resisted leaving behind: you were two animals that liked the smell of one another. That is a little bit what it is like to disentangle from the habit of writing songs - it may not be convenient in the context of my whole life anymore, but the promise of experiencing that connection again is powerful.
I left my difficult bride once before. I wrote a song called "O My Lover" which didn't have a chorus, and did not pick up a musical instrument or think of a lyric or a melody for 2 years. And it was a relief. It was freedom. And during that period, if my thoughts turned to making music, I turned them away. But eventually I came back - and the first thing I did was record a demo of "O My Lover", replete with brand new chorus. I obviously hadn't quite got it out of my system.
I am thinking that the answer to "Do I want to make music?" is going to be an authentic 'No.' However, this time I have to be sure. I have to remove it cleanly and completely, if I am going to remove it. I don't want to be back here in another 2 years asking myself the question over: too wasteful of time and energy.