Forensic psychologist Nigel Latta’s book Into the Darklands and Beyond: Unveiling the Predators Amongst Us is about working with sexual predators and other criminals as well as troubled adolescents (many of whom are well down that same path). Reading about the evil, sad and depraved I found a distinct relief after The Al Qaeda Reader because—unlike the narrow bombastic hatred of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri—Nigel Latta’s witty perceptiveness about the human condition was engaging itself and informed by an appreciation of the human so lacking in al Qaeda’s paeans to murder and mayhem.

Nigel Latta describes the book as a travel diary that it is, a series of vignettes mostly (but far from only) about working with the troubled and the evil. Nigel Latta starts with a conversation with James, a man who expresses his desire to kill children. Here and elsewhere in the book, Nigel Latta conveys vividly both the sort of people he deals with and how he deals with them. As he explains, any relationship with the person he is dealing with is all he has: if he does not establish any at all, he has nothing to work with. Not that he takes interview reports all that seriously—he is not interested in the lies perpetrators have told previous interviewers. The trick is to ignore what they say: they reveal themselves in what they do. (Economists call that revealed preference.)

As far as he is concerned, niceness (or what people generally view as niceness) is not therapeutic: there is a whole chapter on that.

Nigel Latta found his first murderer very frightening. The frightening thing was he found himself liking said murderer: a man regretful of the burden his past placed on a daughter he was worried about.

Nigel Latta had good parents and, at the age of 14, experienced a dead man vomiting into his mouth. (An elderly man had collapsed and the young Nigel was helping with CPR.) That experience gave him a benchmark for what was a bad experience. Generally, what he subsequently experienced as a teenager really did not rate as bad. Not compared to a dead man vomiting into his mouth.

Nigel Latta got into working with criminals due to a happenstance while doing his Master’s in Psychology. He was talked into doing his research report evaluating a program treating sex offenders. After participating in a weekend workshop on getting sex offenders to empathize with their victims, he was hooked. Within a couple of months, he was working as a therapist in the program. ( journeys through the Bad Man )

And, having started the book with James, we end the book with him too.

Into the Darklands is all about meeting the Bad Man at one remove, through the eyes and actions of an engaging, memorable therapist. At the end, one finds one has been entertained, informed, engaged, disturbed and—if one has been awake and aware—had your view of things that matter moved. A fine book, full of wit, perception and wisdom.

I suspect that most of my readers are aware of the Litany Against Fear which has well and truly made it into popular culture.

Fear is an issue for me, due to my upbringing. Not anxiety as such, I have dealt with that, but ultimately irrational fears leading to destructive procrastination and indecision.

I have begun doing meditation regularly. I was using the Litany Against Fear as a focus, but was not entirely happy with it, for reasons based on buddhist psychology. Also, I was after a way of dealing with habits of fearing rather than immediate anxiety.

So I have created my own version. It is something of a work in progress, so comments particularly welcome.

I have created my fear.
It is I who makes my fear matter.
So I will let it not matter.
For my fear is not me.
I was here before my fear. I will be here after my fear.
I will face my fear.
I will look into the heart of my fear and see its emptiness.
I will allow my fear to pass through me.
I will see its path as it passes, leaving nothing behind it.
Having let it not matter, only I will remain.

Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War is a study of how Zen Buddhism became deeply complicit in Japanese militarism

Brian Victoria, a Soto Buddhist priest, directly challenges the “touchy-feelie” good image that Buddhism has in the West. Especially Zen Buddhism in the US. Zen at War is particularly confronting in what it shows about D T Suzuki’s support for Japanese militarism, given his sage-like status in the West. But it is simple projection to expect that the history of Buddhism would somehow be immune to the pressures, failings and corruptions that other religions have experienced. Which is not to argue that “all religions are the same”: that is simply not true. Merely that they all exist within human societies and so are subject to the human condition. ( in the world )

What comes out of Zen at War particularly clearly is that the reduction of Zen to a technique made it an empty vessel to be put at the service of whatever were the strongest social forces around it. D T Suzuki exemplifies this when he wrote: Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with (p.107). Since fear of death is the central thing a soldier typically has to struggle with, a philosophy that focuses the understanding to free oneself from fear of death has obvious utility for a warrior, a point Suzuki made repeatedly.

Zen easily becomes a worship of the will. As does Heidegger’s philosophy. Which, in both cases, led to bad places. (One of the bothersome things in contemporary politics has been to see Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn et al increasingly succumb to worship of the will.)

Which is not to say that Zen does not incorporate genuine insights. Indeed, that is precisely the problem. Something with genuine value can become that much more destructive if put to maleficent use. Zen at War is an effective and thought-provoking case study. It is made more so because Brian Victoria understands, and conveys, that troubling ambivalence well.

The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers and Warriors in Premodern Japan by Mikael S Adolphson is a narrative history of political demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Japan up until the C14th. A little too much of a narrative history—I would have liked some more in-depth discussion of the institutional arrangements.

Nevertheless, it is a very informative rendition of disputes within the Japanese political elite from the C9th to the C14th. That is, the period when the warrior class was steadily increasing its role in Japanese society. Adolphson argues that Japan had a tripartite arrangement of power (courtiers, monasteries, warriors) where power shifted only gradually to the warriors.

For anyone interested in medieval European history, medieval Japan is a fascinating compare-and-contrast, because a completely different cultural milieu produced great institutional similarities.

Japan did not suffer the same prolonged assault that Latin Christendom did from the C7th to the C11th centuries, where the Norse, the Avars-then-Magyars and the Saracens raided and plundered from the North, the East and the South respectively. Nor did it suffer the collapse in literacy and trade that occurred in Western Europe during and after the evaporation of the Western Roman Empire. What Japan had in common with Latin Christendom was a temperate climate, a geography that facilitated movement in ideas and skills but impeded full political unification and a lack of external conquest (allowing continuous institutional evolution). ( similarities )

I enjoyed the tales of competition and intrigue that Adolphson tells. While thematically concentrating on the history of monastic protest, Gates of Power gave me much more insight into the operation of the various Buddhist monasteries and sects—particularly as vehicles for providing religious support for legitimate authority, more easily fulfilled by esoteric forms of Buddhism—the diffuse and competitive nature of power in Japanese society after the founding of the bakufu, the rise of the Ashikaga family, the often dominant role of retired Emperors (the role of Emperor itself was largely ceremonial and ritual so, by retiring, an Emperor rid himself of such time-consuming duties while exercising paternal authority over the notional head of state). I was also amused by the discussion early on about how commentators have often seen religious or monastic power as inherently illegitimate has a tendency to get in the way of careful analysis. A useful and informative read.

One of the long-term blocks for me against Buddhist thought has been that I was not interested in renouncing desire, which always seemed too much like renouncing one’s humanity. But that, as therapist Mark Epstein shows in Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, his latest rendering of the insights of Buddhist psychology for Western audiences, that is not an accurate rendition of Buddha’s teaching.

Buddha renounced asceticism. The question is far more how to think of desire and how to experience it. Words (and thoughts) are abstractions, simplifications from reality. Thus, Zen Buddhism talks about mind-to-mind transmission of Buddha’s understanding from master-to-master outside of the limitations of words or letters. Hence the story of Buddha holding up a flower, all his monks looking puzzled except for one (Kasyapa) who smiled and to whom Buddha then announced the passing of dharma.

Thus also the collision between the purity of desire and the messiness of reality. To put it another way, the (misleading) simplicity of desire and the (actual) complexity of reality. Do we focus on the desire and what it provides and teaches, or the satisfaction, with all its potential to fall short of our “pure” imaginings? ( having or being had by )

Epstein uses Buddhist, Hindu (particularly the Ramayana), ancient Greek, Judaic references interweaved with his cases from therapeutic practice and his own experiences to make his points. This, along with his pellucidly clear proses, creates a sense of openness and connectedness, as if understanding can flow from many places and is open to all.

A very helpful text.

While reading Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, I came across the following passage: If people have never felt loved or accepted by their parents, for example, they will be much more likely to find themselves in intimate relationships in which they continue to feel unloved. Then they try extra hard to make themselves lovable while continuing to feel there is something wrong with them.

This struck rather close to home. Epstein argues that a proper understanding of renunciation is helpful in such circumstances: By voluntarily forsaking compulsive patterns of thought and behaviour, where there are ongoing but futile attempts to get unmet needs satisfied, it is possible to open up other pathways that prove more fulfilling … Renunciation can be the missing ingredient when patterns like these predominate. It takes force of will to create circumstances in which something new can happen. Which certainly accords with my own experience.

Epstein then goes on to discuss Tibetan lamas reporting being surprised at how much anger at parents their Western followers express. This is Epstein’s explanation to a Tibetan lama of this pattern. ( objects not subjects )

Back in the main narrative, Epstein continues: Parents sometimes feel that their only purpose is to help their children separate and individuate, but they think about it in objective terms, as another thing to accomplish. Once it has happened, such parents feel useless or obsolete. Often they divorce as soon as the child leaves for college, throwing the children into crisis just as they are needing to move more deeply into themselves.

I can think of a couple of LJ friends who may feel this scenario is familiar. ( loss of connection )

Very enlightening.

Finished This Side of Nirvana: Memoirs of a Spiritually Challenged Buddhist. It is a personal memoir about a Southern American woman’s experience with dharma.

The back cover has a nice quote from the author, Sara Jenkins: The path does not require that we approach it with noble intentions. What I brought to my spiritual seeking was the one thing I had going for me all along, although it took time to recognise its importance – the sincerity of my simple wish to be happy. The book is about overcoming a deep restlessness and finding a place to be. ( finding the sense )

Again and again, the trick seems to be to keep asking why. To dig below the surface feeling, the surface belief, the surface claim (particularly those we make to ourselves) to see what is really going on. And to make sure that our asking is really examining, rather than a surreptitious (or not so surreptitious) surrender, a trapping within, which is itself the problem. Illusion, is not about the world not existing, but about our falling into certain standard cognitive traps about the world and ourselves. What is particularly engaging about This Side of Nirvana is precisely that the author makes no profound claims about herself: she simply has had a productive journey and is kind enough to share it with us.

Finished reading The Rainbow Palace by the late Tenzin Choedrak.

Much of it is a harrowing memoir of imprisonment and torture under the Chinese. As one reads the simply told story, the horror of the Chinese occupation of Tibet is set out yet again. ( horror and compassion )

That the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been horrific is widely known. Now, Tibetans are a minority in their own country, as Han colonists make Lhasa and other centres majority-Han cities. Choedrak’s story is well worth that just as a story of witness of behalf of himself and those who can no longer speak of what they experienced. This is quite explicitly part of the purpose of his memoir.

But it is also a memoir about trying to see beyond the surface of things to deeper truths and capacities. Love and compassion play a primordial role in our existence. And tolerance. We should exert ourselves to lead a life directed by the awareness of our actions. Thus, whatever happens, we will have nothing to regret. (p.294).

I started getting panic attacks in my early twenties. The family GP wanted to put me on Valium™. I decided that night I wasn’t going to do that and looked at various alternative therapies, including a prolonged period of worrying about food sensitivities (which makes one neurotic about food). It was some years later when my Canberra GP, who had been a clinical ecologist for a while, was the first mainstream medicine person to say anything useful. He pointed out that the body only has one system for coping with stress. If it is not doing so, a wide variety of symptoms may result (including anxiety disorders). The trick was to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress.

This did not solve the problem immediately, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. Looking back now, that my ability to cope with certain forms of stress might be flawed, and that problems would manifest themselves in anxiety, makes perfect sense given my upbringing.

If I let my blood sugar get too low, or too high by sugaring up, my body tends to produce anxiety-inducing hormones. My body is less likely to do so if I have been doing a reasonable amount of aerobic exercise. (Tai Chi also seems to help and has the advantage of not being strenuous.) These are physical steps to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress. (Good nutrition, exercise: the normal stuff.)

Nowadays, I can recognise the feeling of the urge to be anxious. More importantly, I can separate the impulse to be anxious from actually being anxious. The main trick to dealing with anxiety disorder is to realise that whatever you are actually worrying about is a complete epiphenomenon. The anxiety is chemically induced. The mind, being a great rationaliser, finds something to cognitively “carry” the anxiety. I am feeling anxious, there must be a reason for that, what is worrying me, oh, it must be … Whatever the […] is, is completely irrelevant to dealing with the problem. If you engage with the […] you are lost in the epiphenomenon, wasting resources that could be used to actually deal with the anxiety. Worse, you will reinforce the anxiety, by creating positive feedback.

Which is where Zen and buddhist psychology can help. It provides the basis for gaining critical distance from one’s mental states. Separating the impulse to be anxious from actual anxiety.

It also provides techniques for quieting the mind. Even if one does not engage in full meditation, just letting the mind rest during some repetitive activity (not worrying if things “pop in” but not going with them either) improves the ability to separate the impulse from the feeling and reduces the uncontrolled “static” that emotional disorders feed off. These are mental techniques for improving the capacity to cope with stress.

It doesn’t happen immediately, it takes practice. But it is amazing what a difference it makes, to dealing with the problem to the quality of life generally.

How many Zen monks does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change it and one not to change it. (p.178)

I came across a discounted copy of Bones of the Master: A Journey into Secret Mongolia by George Crane while bookshop trawling with monstah in Carnegie.

It is the story of the 1959-60 escape of Tsung Tsai, a Chinese-Mongolian Ch’an monk from the People’s Republic and its brutal persecution of Buddhism, his friendship in the US with his neighbour George Crane and their journey back to the People’s Republic in the late 1990s to begin the process of creating a stupa for Tsung Tsai’s master Shuih Deng. The collectivisation famine of the Great Leap Forward was underway as Tsung Tsai walked from Inner Mongolia to Hong Kong and the descriptions of the suffering and death he witnessed are fairly harrowing.

Zen Buddhism came to Japan via Korea and China, a fairly normal route for pre-European influences on Japanese culture. In China, the tradition which became Zen in Japan is known as Ch’an Buddhism (in Korea it is Seon Buddhism) and appears to be based on dhyana (meditation) method in Indian Buddhism. (One take on Indian religious history is that Hinduism developed as a transformation of the ancient Vedic religion in response to the challenge of Buddhism: in Western terms, it would be as if the neo-platonists, perhaps under the patronage of Julian the Apostate, had successfully revamped Classical Graeco-Roman polytheism into a highly sophisticated religion which then largely supplanted Christianity.)

Tsung Tsai’s monastery was completely destroyed by the Red Army after he left. More murder and destruction came from the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. All part of the long, sad, brutal history of those who think they have the Keys to History being brutally intolerant of alternative ideas. The book is yet another reminder of how important Hong Kong (and Taiwan) have been in preserving Chinese culture and heritage during the onslaught of the Maoist darkness. The story of Tsung Tsai's journey back also makes clear the spiritual hunger which various observers have noted about contemporary China.

The narrator, George Crane, is a very live figure in much of the book, as he introduces us to Tsung Tsai and accompanies him to China and back. His sceptical-yet-impressed affection for his neighbour is part of the charm of the book. But Tsung Tsai is the real centre of the book. It is a delight to make his acquaintance and see a Ch’an master living life. Wisdom as simplicity, attention and compassion is not mere belief, but the entire practice of his life. As I struggle my way through the prolix self-importance of major C20th continental European thinkers, meeting Tsung Tsai makes their flaws seem even more striking. I am reminded of the story of the Zen master who, frustrated with trying to talk to a European philosopher, began to fill the philosopher’s tea cup until it overflowed. When the philosopher protested, the Zen master responded that you cannot put into what is already occupied.

But Tsung Tsai is no plaster saint, he is a very real person. I recommend his acquaintance.

I used to be very phobic about flying: flying for me was a matter of constant, intense, anxiety before and during the flight. I am still not comfortable about small aircraft, and if I am tired, I find twinges of the old anxiety resurface even in jets, but nowadays, I generally greatly enjoy flying in jets.

Studies suggest that what generates much fear about flying – which is a very safe form of travel: it is far safer to fly from Melbourne to Canberra than drive there – is the (unfamiliar and prolonged) lack of control. Realising your own powerlessness is the first step in banishing anxiety. As you are powerless, there is no benefit to your anxiety, there is only cost. Self-imposed cost. Your anxiety is therefore illusory – it purports to be about something useful, when it is entirely worse than useless.

Worse, worrying about things you cannot change and are not responsible for means you are neglecting your responsibility for what you can change – your state of mind. The ego is inflated – worrying about things you are not responsible for and cannot change – while the self is atrophied. One is being inattentive to what you are genuinely responsible for while being delusory attentive to what you are not responsible for.

It is perfectly true that any moment might be your last. You cannot change that. But you can change how those moments are. So change them. Shed the illusion of control for the reality of it.

This may seem fatalistic – that its apparent insouciance in the face of death deprecates life – but it is far from that. It is being responsible. After all, you are not only willingly inflicting anxiety on yourself but, in all likelihood, at least at a subliminal level, also on those around you. You should not burden them with your lack of control over your own states of mind. Nor should you burden yourself with it.

Such attentiveness –what Buddhist thought calls mindfulness – is about shedding illusion and taking responsibility. Life becomes sweeter and more vivid, freed of needless, diminishing anxiety. It is a bit like mental massage – you wash away those needless defences and restrictions, letting feeling flow more naturally and more easily. (I have noticed my sexual responses have improved greatly.)

But, since it is a matter of attending to responsibility, I still get the odd twinge if I am tired or run down. Tiredness, worn mental resources, means one becomes more likely to lapse into pointless anxiety, to let a lazy mind create pointless fears. But a bit of effort restores mindfulness.

Nowadays, I like having a window seat. It provides great views, and moments of wonder.

The other day, I was thinking about when was the happiest time in my life, and I realised the happiest time in my life was this time. A lot of things have led to this point, but an important help along the way has been reading (and re-reading) Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein.

I have now also read Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective an earlier book by Epstein. It is at once more Freudian than the later book (not a good point in my eyes) but also more systematically Buddhist. Indeed, the Buddhism notably improves the Freudian content. The book moves through three parts: (1) Buddha’s psychology of the mind, (2) meditation and (3) therapy. The first part deals with Buddhist taxonomy of the mind, the problems of desire, the false notions of self. The second discusses the benefits of meditation for proper understanding. The third explains how Buddhist notions give an end-point to therapy that the psychoanalytical tradition lacks. There are some striking observations about Western mentality and its difficulties.

Once one achieves a certain level of mindfulness, life becomes very different. No matter how long a road it was to getting there. Looking back, the effect of my own mystical experience in my mid-20s was to give a sense that other ways of feeling were possible. That there was an achievable alternative to how I normally felt, to my damaged self. But it wasn’t even close to a solution in itself. Similarly, the horrible time I had from about 1998 to 2002 had the effect of forcing me to confront and deal with things that, up to then, had merely been an "acceptable" level of psychic poison. Epstein is very good at helping to lose the fear of what one is, so one also loses the fear of what one is not. Thereby becoming comfortable with who one is, rather than barely knowing who one is.

As to the Freudian elements in Thoughts without a Thinker, monstah made the perspicacious observation the other day that a parent’s treatment of the child can be a reaction to the child. Thus, a father is likely to be more distant to a gay son (who is different in perhaps unsettling ways) while a mother is likely to be closer to a (gay) son who is more like her than expected. This is a fundamental observation that psychoanalysts managed to miss for decades. Psychoanalysis is not based on careful scientific observation, which is why Freudianism is rapidly dying as our genuine knowledge expands. Though, one of the strengths of Epstein’s book is that he makes it clear Freud was much more open-minded and perspicacious than his later followers (a common difficulty). And, to be fair to Epstein, he very much sees Buddhist pyschology as a way of dealing with gaps in Freudian thinking: Freud lamented ... that psychoanalysis was unable by itself to produce an ego strong and versatile enough to accomplish his therapeutic goals. By working directly with the metaphorical experience of self, meditation offers a complementary method of ego development, one that fills the gap that Freud was left struggling with (p.155).

My previous post on chemicals and cognition sparked a bit of a discussion of neuro-linguistic programming. I should clarify from that post that I think Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart is a fine book. One of the things I like about Epstein’s book, and related works on Buddhist notions of mindfulness, is how it makes one sceptical and aware of one’s own mental patterns. My take is that I am against programming as such: I don’t want ‘better’ programming, I want, in a sense, no programming. Now, of course, you have to have reasoning processes which can be characterised as ‘programming’, but that is more operating means rather than operating instructions.

Saturday, sjkasabi put on a fine Spring/Anti-Easter affair. She plied us with home-baked cinnamon buns, vonstrassburg provided geflte fish and mozza balls in soup. doushkasmum, Paul, splodgenoodles, tenbears, mrsbrown, mr_bassman, gindi, T & Z all enjoyed the comestibles and company. Then sjkasabi introduced us to Firefly and Ultraviolet. She should have us over for more!

Monday night, was the meeting of the Adam Smith Club, where the speaker was John Williams, a Uniting Church minister and student of philosophy and ardent supporter of classical liberalism. Amusing bloke who thought we all should be better read.

During my Friday afternoon late lunch with Nikie, talked about depression and the issue of chemicals and cognition, including how I distinguish between the cases of depression which are mainly an imbalance in brain chemicals – the brain just works badly in a particular way – and those which are mainly a cognitive problem, an issue of the ‘propositions in your head’. Les Murray’s depression was a good example of the latter, hence his use of poetry to ‘root out’ the ideas in his head – as is so often the case, the subtext of his childhood experiences – which were causing him problems. Some years ago, an older-and-wiser friend commented that he could see how a persistent error in reasoning could mentally unbalance someone, as the world would keep not acting as they expected. Quite

Alas, those propositions can be very deeply buried and hidden. Recently re-read Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart to try and get at some of the root causes of some of my blocks to action. Somewhat helpful. It did strike me how deeply problematic love has been for me, with my parents being so very bad at positive expression and the whole Ben C disaster. Including self-love. That sort of learned insecurity can both shrink and inflate the self: shrink it so that you’re not worthy, you don’t matter so time shouldn’t be spent on you and inflate it so that it’s tedious and boring and awkward and doing other things are much more fun. The state of mind is literally unbalanced.

Been trying to put into a phrase, as the result of my Canberra trip weekend before last, how one describes Canberra drivers. It’s a curious amalgam of smug, tentative semi-competence. Which is to say, they typically don’t pay much attention to anyone else yet tend to be hesitant in strange ways. In a city of public servants too, fancy that.

Saturday morning, fleabombed the house and took Prunella to the vet over her eczema. I now leap on her in the morning and evening and drop half an antibiotic tablet down her throat. She doesn’t like it.

Had cleaners in to do the kitchen and bathroom on Sunday. This was my housemate Jennifer’s idea, which I had agreed to. It turned out to be a major breakdown in communication, since I was supposed, apparently, to be paying for all $176 of it. Jennifer has been living here since November last year. This has brought to a head for me various issues. I tend, seeking a quiet life, to go along with things. Up to a point. The point has been reached. That I recognise that, to some extent, it is again a bit of harking back (for me) to aspects of my upbringing, so it has not been the adult but the child which has been ‘in charge’ a fair bit of our domestic interactions, provides extra reasons to deal with a few matters.

Far and away, the best thing about depression is getting over it.

Thinking back, there seems to be three elements to tackle:
propositions about oneself (the whispering traitors of the mind as I call them);
mental habits; and
the significance of emotion – what might be called emotions-about-emotions or meta-emotions.

Propositions about oneself are ideas one has about oneself which you are either not aware of having or are not aware of their pathological nature. Typically, they are the unseen subtext of one’s upbringing incorporated within one’s psyche.

( propositions )

The there are mental habits, usually the routinised incorporation of the same subtext. Once you become aware of them, they are the easiest to tackle. The simple techniques of cognitive therapy can be very helpful. But true mental health is not achieved until you do.

Finally, there is the question of the significance of one’s feelings, meta-emotions – emotions about emotions. ( meta-emotions )

Often, there is some negative event or events that is at the originating heart of depression. How does one look at them, even after one has achieved control over one’s own responses? Particularly at any perpetrators?

Daffyd once said to me that forgiveness is something to be done from a position of unassailable strength. Quite so. If the perpetrators are still in your life, I would suggest that one doesn’t forgive until after contrition, otherwise the negative pattern will continue. But whether or not the perpetrators are still in your life or not, don’t forgive until there is nothing left to deal with. Forgiveness is then real, as it is the last step; the step taken from that unassailable strength. The place where you have exorcised the whispering traitors of the mind, no longer perpetuate destructive mental habits and your emotions belong to you, not you to them.

Having spent years suffering high levels of emotional pain, Buddhism was naturally a possible solution. But the typical Western summary of its path as ‘giving up desire’ put me off: to give up desire struck me as to give up being human. While down in the Latrobe Valley a few weeks ago, I bought at a newsagent in Moe the book Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness by psychiatrist Mark Epstein. The book is simply about buddhism-as-psychology – as far as I can see, what it has to say is compatible with any religious tradition. I read it, and then re-read it. I have been meaning to talk about how it has changed my perspective and effectively banished my pain, but I have not known quite how to express it. But it is simply this: I was suffering an emptiness that I did not see as emptiness but as lack – in my case, a lack of intimate love and the deeper fear that lack was just. This book enabled me to see what I was suffering was emptiness, to embrace that emptiness and to have it no longer cause me pain. I feel whole; I feel more human not less.

I am also much calmer, far fewer things irritate me, I laugh more. Situations of stress are much easier to handle. I have a pervasive feeling of triumph and a confidence that there is much more to discover.

Aspects of cognitive therapy have also been helpful – becoming aware of how easy it is to fall into negative feedback mental habits which are merely that – mental habits.

( and also )