Why worry? The simple answer is that’s one of the main things your biology is geared up to do. Humans, in common with probably all other creatures, are designed to worry. It makes biological sense; we need to remember when bad things happen (you eat a poisonous berry, get ambushed by a tiger or whatever) in order to avoid them next time round. Our memory for bad things is phenomenal. I was teaching mindfulness meditation recently and doing a practice known as the body scan (HERE). One mediator told me after the session that she had experienced a ‘memory’ of a neurological problem she’d had with her arm several years before when bringing awareness to that part of her body. She’d not thought about the ailment for many years but, during the body scan, she could feel as if (as Spare might say) the condition had returned. After the session her arm felt perfectly normal but this was a neat insight into how we remember bad stuff and can, under the right conditions, easily recall discomfort, pain and fear.

Not a state of mind to aim for…

Of course it’s also true to say that humans (and indeed other beasts) are pretty good at normalising things too. Boredom comes naturally to us. Just another day in the gulag, just another abusive email from the regular troll at your website, just another homeless person on the street as you walk to work   – even the nastiest things can become humdrum. When the scary becomes predictable then the shock is gone and we slip into dull resignation or even disdain. And that’s where worry comes in. If we worry our minds search around for ‘the problem’. The curious thing is once ‘the problem’ is dealt with another, new problem arises. Just like the thoughts we encounter in mindfulness. Worrying trains of thought that can be particularly tricky to wake up from because they lock into much of what we, as biological organisms are meant to do. To recall what was bad, to anticipate future bad stuff and to imagine strategies to avoid bad stuff in the future. Worry keeps ‘the problem’ fresh by picking at the scab of attention.

Much of our culture feeds and indeed exacerbates these tendencies in our biology. Much of the media is based on selling fear. Fear, which we gobble up because we like it, our neurology craves it. And to stop our mental palate getting jaded we need that fear to come in a variety of ever morphing forms; terrorism was last weeks worry, this week it’s phenylbutazone in our horse burgers, next week (after a brief topping up our Middle Eastern crisis levels) perhaps it will be the antics of doomsday cultists or the catastrophic failure of our antibiotic medicines?

This focus on fear surrounds itself with a variety of supporting memes which help us rationalise why we feed ourselves this diet. One such meme is ‘realism’; that is if we don’t choose to engage in feeding ourselves this material we must be sticking our heads in the sand, ignoring what’s going on in the ‘real world’ (as though that’s what the media presents) and living in a rose-tinted fantasy land. Such a belief can be challenged in a variety of ways. One is the observation that people who choose to engage with lots of mainstream media content, soap operates and so forth are (objectively) less good at assessing risk than those who don’t. If you spend your evenings watching gritty hospital dramas and real-life police action shows you are very likely to hugely over estimate your chances of being involved in a violent crime, and to guess a very high figure for how many people actually do die in tragic accidents. (A few nice bits of information about human reactions to on-screen violence HERE)

Now I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be prepared to meet the full horror of the world face-on.  A visit to the Holocaust galleries of the The Imperial War Museum, London is one way to do this or simply dip into the darker side of Youtube (such as this deeply distressing Pathé news film of troops attacking Borneo HERE). It’s a necessary condition of an intelligent engagement with the world to consider the destruction of the biosphere, the social inequalities in the world and our own personal pain. But in my view the wise person, the skilled magician, also ensures that their soul is well nourished with delight, compassion and indeed ecstasy.

One process for doing this is the traditional peyote ceremony. The basic technique is to spend a night sitting around a ceremonial fire having ingested the Grandfather medicine. At various points in the vigil the glowing ashes of the central fire are swept out to form the shape of the thunderbird or love heart. Prayer and songs are used to invoke happiness and to promote a sense of thankfulness. Cedar incense is offered to bring purification, and at the end of the rite there is a feast. Grateful of the well-being which the medicine brings, and the support of our Brothers and Sisters around us, in a space of acceptance and respect, joy pushes out the sadness, the worry, the fear. The medicine ceremony grants ecstasy and in that space the healing power of compassion and gratitude may do its work.

Those Huichol chaps know a thing or two

Like mindfulness the ritual of the peyote circle may not change our actual circumstances. But what it can do is provide us with a new input of intense happiness. In the morning our concerns are not magically fixed but what we do have is a space. Worry has been placed in perspective, into a broader context. A little of the ‘free floating anxiety’ in our lives has passed from the amygdala to the hippocampus and we are better able to face the future from a place that isn’t just informed by the gloomy fixation of our simian biology. (More on the biology of mindfulness HERE.)

There are many ceremonies, many acts, many ways of thinking that we can use to intelligently re-engineer our minds. And while we may face hard times to do so from a place of equipoise is much more likely to lead to accurate judgement of situations and good choices than if our minds are full of fear. We’re also much more likely to be capable of experiencing and indeed creating happiness for ourselves and others.

So with whatever ways are at your disposal, feed your soul and may you be able to discover the delight in your life in the past, present and the future.

JV

Sometimes I feel like I’m going around in circles. As part of my day job as a therapist, it feels that part of my raison d’être is witnessing the strange spirals in the lives of other human beings. For those who think that change happens in a straight line, they probably haven’t been paying attention in class. Whether it’s related to addictions work, relationship difficulties or trying to more skilfully manage emotions, most of us have to revisit what the pro’s call “the cycle of change” at least several times before things shift.

The cycle of change (cf. the work of Prochaska and DiClemente) recognises that for most of us, for the act of changing to be sustainable it usually involves contemplation (thinking about how it might be different) and preparation before we actually “do” something behaviourally. Now this is all for the good-most of us know what it feels like to be compelled into choices that we haven’t given birth too, and that generally they are superficial and usually don’t “stick”. Slowing down the pace of change is often good in that it allows a more organic adaptation and considered reprioritising. While the rapid shifts connected to crisis are often unavoidable, if that’s all we have then structurally we end up with a big pile of rubble rather than the lovely extension/expansion we were hoping for.

Spirals of change

It’s hardly surprising that spirals feature so significantly within sacred symbology – as a representation of what it feels like to journey inward or outward, in ascent or descent, the spiral reflects that it often seems as though history is repeating itself whilst in reality we are moving closer to the goal (even if it’s not necessarily the one we initially intended!) Whether we use the spatial metaphor of a descent in search of depth or an ascent to gain awakening, we can often feel caught up in a psychological “groundhog day” as we revisit the same issues within ourselves and the same dynamics within the same relationships.

Sometimes it may feel as though we are making little if any progress, and the lure of the shiny and new can feel like an essential life “upgrade” that it’s hard to say no to. Learning anything via repetition: dance, martial arts or playing a musical instrument can feel like hard work as we develop muscle memory or lay down those neural pathways.

In working within the wheel of the year, be it in a Heathen, Druid or other setting, we experience in this turning a sense of this repetition at a macrocosmic level. What seems critical in the midst of these big cycles is the degree of awareness that we bring in noticing the often subtle shifts and differences over time and location. Even if we were to celebrate each festival in exactly the same location, the variance in conditions and our own place in the life cycle bring newness with it.

In working in our “Zen-Hearth”, part of the rationale for integrating Pagan and mindfulness based approaches is to try and wake-up to the subtleties of this spiralling process. Often we can be in danger of over codifying our seasonal rituals and swamping ourselves with pre-existing scripts about how things should be. By paying attention to the process of interaction between self and context, we are seeking a type of deep listening to the relevant Genius Loci or “Spirit of Place” (cf. the excellent Wanton Green for more on this).

The Western Magical tradition often deals in the rather bizarre paradox of minimising difference and local context (“no really Odin and Mercury are virtually the same-look where they are on the Qabalah!”) while at the same time injecting things with sanity challenging “hidden” meaning (Kenneth Grant’s use of Gematria being a case in point). Often we can’t see the wood for the trees! It might be that we need to opt for some cognitive self-limitation, a type of voluntary simplicity in which we seek a mindful sensitivity to the nuances of localised animism. In the development of my own practice this feels vital in my own attempt to escape the excesses of occult consumerism and neophilia.

Can’t see the wood for the trees?

While the hardcore enlightenment project of Theravarda Buddhism maybe appealing in its thorough engagement with the internal processes of the bodymind, I’m personally more intrigued by the messier adventures of the Buddha’s teaching as it encountered the shamanic traditions of cultures it came to. Whether that be the Bon religion, Taoism or Shinto, the interaction between self and context feels vital. In order to escape the traps of either magickal solipsism (“I am a God!”) or overly romanticised pantheism, the rediscovery of mindfulness as a dialogue of awakening feels important. As we experience this interplay we can begin to realise that for our insights to continue to be meaningful they have to be expressed via engaged activity. Perhaps this slow, open receptivity to context and place within the cycle of change will allow expressions of “right effort” and “right livelihood” to be more skilful and sustainable.

SD