therapy – Page 3 – Kaspa Thompson

How to move forward and take positive action

exclusion layer kaleidoscope by Ok Shawna

This article first appeared in the Autumn edition of All About Malvern.

In our small town, nestled safely into the side of these ancient hills, the sun is shining. In other parts of the world the weather is not so kind. As I write this people are assessing the damage from two hurricanes that moved through the Caribbean islands and the east coast of the United States. The west coast of the United States is full of smoke from devastating wild fires. Thousands of people in Asia have been displaced as a result of flooding. A few days ago there was an earthquake in South America.

The news is not only full of extreme events in the natural world, but of devastation and the potential for devastation caused more directly by human beings.

How do we proceed in a world like this?

It can be tempting to see these crises in the world as an invitation to respond in some way. There is some wisdom in asking the question, “What does the world want from me?” But asking this question can lead to being overwhelmed or frozen with indecision. Sometimes we see this on a smaller scale when events in our own lives seem to overtake us and we can’t find a way back towards taking positive action.

My Buddhist teacher, David Brazier, suggests that a better to question to ask is, “What does reality want from me?”

Reality includes what’s happening in the world, or the big events in our own lives. It also includes us. Human beings have strengths and weaknesses. We have some things that we are skilled at offering to other people and the world, some things that are on the edge of our comfort zone, and some things that are impossible for us to offer.

When I first moved to Malvern I asked myself this kind of question.

I imagined two circles: the first — what the world was calling for; the second — what my skills were. I asked myself what was in the space where these two circles overlapped. Out of this questioning came the first of the courses I teach in mindfulness meditation.

Keeping my interest on the place these circles overlap has led me forward in my life, to other work and projects. It has also taken me through a process of getting to know myself more deeply and of self-acceptance.

Asking yourself this question might lead to small actions at first: making a friend of cup of tea, holding the door open for someone or smiling at a neighbour. Perhaps it will lead on to offerings that take a little more time: planting some wildflower seeds in your garden, giving a lift to someone who struggles to get around or choosing to volunteer in your community.

Living in this way is deeply satisfying.

We take realistic positive action, pointing ourselves in the direction of unfolding goodness, starting from a position of self-empathy and self-acceptance. In this way we grow and flourish. We move towards a place of joy as we make beneficial and sustainable offerings to ourselves and the world.

What’s the point of empathy?

This morning as I took my usual morning walk around the garden I heard a bird call that I didn’t recognise. I looked up and there was a female blackbird, with its mottled brown coat, sitting up high in the copper beech above me. It wasn’t singing the usual blackbird song. A warning call, I guessed, and turned around to see that one of my cats had followed me into the garden.

The cat, Tsuki, was sitting at the top of a few low steps. She — like all my cats —hates walking on grass. She stretched out in my direction when she saw my looking at her, and started that purr which means come over here and stroke me. I gave her some fuss and then carried on my walk, noticing what was growing, which flower beds needed weeding and the places where I was sure I had planted things that hadn’t come up yet.

I noticed a couple of tadpoles swimming up to the surface of our small pond. Recently they have been keeping out of sight down in the deep waters. I have watched them change from gelatinous frog spawn, to tiny tadpoles, to bigger ones and I hope that some of them make it to adulthood.

It’s hard to imagine how all of these different creatures experience the world; impossible, perhaps. Naturalist Charles Foster tried to see through the eyes of animals by living in their world. To get closer to the experience of a badger he got right down to the forest floor, he dug a set to sleep in and emerged blindfolded, learning to navigate the world through scent and touch. Even then there is a gap: a badger brain is not a human brain.

Sometimes it seems just as difficult to imagine how life is for other people, even though we are all animals of the same species.

We are all born into particular families, into particular cultures and into particular countries, each with their own quirks and standards of normal behaviour. Some of what we are handed down is good and some of what we are handed down less so. We meet someone with different experiences to us and think, “How can they like that?” or “Why are they doing that?” A gulf opens up between us.

Misunderstandings can happen even in the most intimate of relationships. We fail to notice how important something is to our partner, or we each happen to be prioritising different things and suddenly we are arguing or not speaking to each other at all.

Human beings don’t tend to like real change and so when we come into conflict much of our response is often about trying to get out of the conflict whilst avoiding changing or doing anything differently: we tell each other off, or try to use rational thought to work things out, or we run to a distraction. Suddenly there is a real danger of the conflict escalating and things being worse for us and the other person.

Empathy offers a way out of this situation. It’s amazing how really tuning in to what’s happening in the other person, and to what’s happening in us, can make a real difference.

Can we name our own feelings, rather than just acting habitually? Can we tune into the feelings of the other person? What is it about them that we’ve not seen or heard that has got us into this mess? Is there something about our own experience we are missing out?

We’ll never get into someone else’s shoes completely,but really making an effort to get there, and to hear and see and feel more than we did before is an amazingly powerful and transformative practice. Empathy moves us towards understanding, reconnection and to working and living together more easily.

This article first appeared in All About Malvern.

Ten things you can get from therapy

1. Better relationships

As you start to learn what makes you tick, what makes others tick, and what your triggers are, it becomes easier to connect with others and to build better relationships.

2. Increased confidence

A good run of therapy will leave you with more confidence, as you start to trust yourself more deeply.

3. More intuition

If you learn to tune into your own feelings more deeply, they can be a great source of information, and help with making good choices.

4. More energy

Depression and anxiety can use up lots of energy. Coming to terms with difficult events, or stopping worrying, frees up energy that can be put to better use.

5. New skills

Your therapist can help you with some techniques that can help you right in the moments when you are struggling.

6. Better sleep

Not only can a therapist help with ‘sleep hygiene’, the things that bring us to therapy tend to be the things that keep us awake at night: as we move through the therapy process, towards letting go acceptance and change, we can worry less, and sleep better.

7. More relaxation

As we let go of things we have been holding onto, both large and small, our bodies and minds will tend to be more relaxed. And as we let things go, we also learn how to keep letting go, which allows us to be more relaxed more of the time.

8. Your place in the world

Therapy sessions can help you discover what your passion is, and help you to take steps towards following that passion and making it work for you.

9. Ways of getting more done

Therapy can help you create good habits and maintain them; it can teach you that you can still get some things done regardless of your state of mind. Therapy can help you understand what keeps you stuck, and help you move away from that.

10. Therapeutic awareness

What you learn in therapy you can put to use in-between sessions, and after your therapy has finished. You can begin deal with your own thoughts and feelings in a better way. You can learn to let things go, and change what needs to be changed, either on your own or through finding and getting the support you need.

Turning away from anxiety and depression

We usually come to therapy because we are unhappy, or dissatisfied; because we want to change.

Often, what we want to change from is feeling anxious or depressed. Anxiety can be like a constant worrying, both in the mind and in the body, it can be a feeling of being on edge, of always being ready to fight or flee, of being hyper aware of what might go wrong at any moment. Depression is like a dark blanket that covers everything, feeling flat or numb, a loss of energy, not being able to think clearly, a lack of enthusiasm for life, and a deep sense of nothing being right.

How can therapy help any of this?

In my experience therapy works in two different ways, each of which support the other, and support the client to move in a positive direction.

We could say the first of these is conscious, and the second unconscious.

The conscious aspect is what we talk about the in the therapy. We talk about things in order to make them clearer, and to understand the situation we find ourselves in. Through this process we begin to see where some of our unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour have come from. Sometimes we pick up bad habits from others. Sometimes our bad habits are small acts of rebellion. Often they started out as ways of keeping ourselves safe in difficult circumstances.

A deeper understanding of these patterns means that we’re less likely to fall into them.

In this conscious aspect of therapy, we might even take away some ‘homework’: exercises to help us think and feel in new ways, anything from watching how our feelings change through the week, to keeping a gratitude list, to experimenting with new ways of behaving.

The unconscious aspect is to do with the relationship between the client and the therapist: the process of being in relationship and responding to one another. The job of the therapist is to remain steady, whatever happens, to keep an open mind, to move towards a position of feeling warmth towards the client.

As human beings we surround ourselves with people who support our view of our self and the world. If we are anxious or depressed, it’s almost as if those conditions want to continue, and they push us into places, and into relationships, that make that more likely. We isolate ourselves, or feel drawn towards people and situations that support our dysfunctional ways of thinking.

The therapist is a different kind of person. They stay open and warm towards the client, without getting drawn into to supporting these dysfunctional habits and ideas. This has a powerful effect on the client, who begins to feel less afraid of change, and of moving towards more positive ways of being.

As the client begins to trust the therapist, they also begin to trust themselves, and to trust in the possibility of being different in the world: of being happier.

We could say some of the good qualities of the therapist begin to rub off on the client.

Both of these aspects work together. As we begin to understand ourselves, and consciously practice new ways of being, our trust begins to grow.

As our trust grows, it becomes easier to understand ourselves, and to try out new ways of being in the world.

Both of these aspects work to help us move away from anxiety and depression, towards a positive way of being.

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.comto book in a first session, via Skype or face to face.

Why do we come to therapy?

stone-buddha Why do we come and sit in a room, and talk to a stranger, and share our deepest thoughts and feelings?

My therapy room is at the end of a long narrow corridor. In the winter the corridor is light by bulbs hanging in Victorian glass lampshades. In the summer, light from the open doors of other rooms pools in.

In my room there’s a two seater sofa, and a bucket chair. The sofa is blue and white, and most of my clients sit here, but not all of them. Whenever I’m seeing a client, I light the fat church candle that sits in the closed off fireplace.

There is a stone Buddha, sitting on a small table between the sofa and the chair. It’s a peaceful room.

Someone arriving for a first session can be full of all sorts of feelings: anxiety about meeting someone new, a longing for things to be different, perhaps some nerves about starting to talk about how things are at the moment.

It’s a brave act, coming to see a therapist, and when I see clients for the first time, I remember this, and how it was for me to be a client, back when I was in therapy myself.

I listen, without making any value judgements. The act of being heard is a powerful one.

People come because they want to change. Change is possible, but often happens in surprising ways.

Sometimes we might set goals together, and come up with realistic steps to take us nearer to those goals, and sometimes the process of change happens through more subtle means.

My job as therapist is to be a steady presence, to be sympathetic to the troubles of the client, but not so caught up in them that I lose my own sense of balance.

As people we are influenced by the people that we hang out with, and the places that we go. We can see this all around us, as people dress to fit in with one group, or change their behaviour to fit in with another. This is a mostly sub-conscious process.

Being in relationship to my steady presence, just coming and hanging out in the peaceful space of the therapy room, is just as important, perhaps more so, than what gets talked about in the sessions.

This is how the process of change happens: by dipping ourselves into good conditions, into the therapy room, over and over again. Slowly we began to relax, and our old habits and ways of thinking become less powerful. We move towards acceptance, letting go, and change.

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.comto book in a first session, via Skype or face to face.

The biggest frog (how to get things done)

I sat facing a blank page for about an hour this morning. Occasionally I wrote a few words and then I deleted them. They didn’t feel like the beginning of anything worthwhile.

I wrote about my oldest cat sleeping at my feet. I wrote about the squirrel stealing peanuts from the bird feeder. I wrote about the new seedlings we have just planted out. And then I deleted all of the words and there was the blank page.

I opened my favourite social media sites and closed them again. I browsed the news headlines. I looked out of the window. I looked at the blank page.

I thought a change of scene might help so I went and walked around the garden. It was cold and the sun was hiding behind grey clouds, and although I half-planned where new flower beds might be I didn’t think of anything to write about.

I came back inside and started to make a cup of tea. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered an old friend that I had been meaning to write to for a little while.

We used to be in regular contact but for reasons I don’t completely understand communication seemed to break down this year. We kept missing each other, arranging to meet and not quite managing it, and then we just stopped talking to each other…

For a while I thought I might hear something from them, and then I put it out of my mind and got on with all of the things I have to do: seeing clients, running a temple and running my mindfulness classes. Or at least I thought I had put it out of my mind, but every now and again I would find myself telling other friends about what had happened. Eventually I realised that I hadn’t really let this go at all and that’s when I decided to write to them.

That was sometime last week. I could have carved out time to write before today but the immediate demands on my time allowed me to keep distracting myself – until this morning when I was faced with a blank page.

I couldn’t get started on this article because something else, the un-written letter, was getting in the way.

Mark Twain said, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

The un-written letter, that I was nervous about writing, was the biggest frog and I kept pushing it to the side of my plate.

I brought my cup of tea back up to my office and wrote the letter. As I wrote it the worries I had around how it might be received disappeared. This friend and I have had a strong relationship in the past and I’m sure it will be received in a good spirit. I hope so at least.

Having swallowed the biggest frog I was able to sit down and write this article.

I’ve learnt this lesson many times before, but I still sometimes find a way of pushing the biggest frog to one side.

If there is something to be done – get on and do it. Putting it off can take just as much energy and can stop you from doing anything else.

What’s your biggest frog today?

This article also appeared in All About Malvern

Living with change

Written late spring/early summer

Suzuki Roshi was once asked if anything was constant in this life. He replied with one word: change.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a wave of hail moving from behind the hills, over the temple and through the valley. Directly above my office, directly above my writing desk, is the dining room balcony. Drum-rolls of hard ice falling onto the flat surface of the balcony roused me from my concentration. I went upstairs to watch the weather.

A few days earlier it had felt like summer had arrived. The sunshine was bright, and the air was warm. It was a real change from the sun and cold wind of winter and spring days. The sun-rose in the garden started to flower. Each delicate, Barbie-pink, flower lasts for just one day.

On my day off, I was looking forward to a day in the heat. I sat in the garden eating breakfast, looking out over the copper-beech, with its orange-yellow blossom, and the plum tree just coming into leaf. Grey clouds drifted in, settling over the sky like a soft blanket. Still, I spent most of the day outside.

In the evening it started to rain. Noisy rain. The cats ran inside, mewing at us, complaining about the weather. I could hear the water from the roof flooding down the downspout and overwhelming the drains. It rained hard through the night. The following morning it eased a little. The rain drops were smaller and softer. More like mist than rain. The slate tiles of the coach house roof I can see from my office window were dark with the wet.

It’s tempting to complain about the rain, and praise the sunshine. But they are each beautiful in their own way. Someone was decorating our shrine room on those wet mornings. It wasn’t ideal conditions, the light was dim, and the paint took longer to dry, but the garden loved the rain. The potatoes plants doubled in size in a couple of days, and the cucumber seedling I planted out on my day off grew taller by an inch a day.

The summer colours were dulled a little by the mist, but still the deep pink magnolia flowers burst from the grey.

If we can just find the right place to stand, all weather is beautiful weather. And all weather changes. The same is true of our own lives.

There are large changes that a life goes through, and we might have some sense of what they are: of how the energy of a life shifts from childhood, through the teenager years to adulthood and old age. Having some sense of this can bring us a kind of solace, we can make peace with knowing that one thing changes into another. But we shouldn’t hold on to tightly to this idea of cycles. Just like the weather there can be unexpected storms in the summer, or days of sunshine in the winter.

Thoughts, feelings, our physical health, all of these change over the years, and all of these change on a daily basis, and all of these change from moment to moment.

The simple act of knowing this can bring us to a calm centre point.

We can’t control man, if any, of these circumstances. But, like the weather, we can change how we look at them, and how we experience them.

In every circumstance there is something beautiful, and every circumstance is always beginning to change into something new.

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.com to book in a first therapy session, via Skype or face to face.

This article first appeared in All About Malvern Hills

How accepting ‘what is’ leads to real change

Sun rays through the fog by Jean-Daniel Echenard

Yesterday afternoon I was tired, and I was grumpy. I was upset with someone for not having behaved how I wanted them too, or how I thought I would have behaved in their situation. I worked over the situation in my mind. I was justifying my upset feelings to myself, but of course this just kept the frustration alive.

I watched the rain running down the window as I did the washing up after lunch. The view across the valley was obscured by a fine grey mist.

Somehow I managed to catch sight of what I was doing: I was resisting reality. I couldn’t change what had happened, and every time I went over events in my mind I was getting more upset. I was pitting what I wanted against what had actually taken place and, naturally, reality won out.

We create a huge amount of pain for ourselves by resisting reality. We’ll all have our own style of doing this, and different styles at different times. Perhaps we distract ourselves by opening a bottle of wine; or reaching for another chocolate; or ordering a new pair of shoes, or that latest collectable online. Perhaps we’ll try to push reality away, getting upset with other people, or inanimate objects. Often anger is an attempt to create distance between us and something unsettling. Perhaps we’ll simply try to pretend that what we don’t like isn’t there, and become exhausted or even depressed as it takes all of our energy to hold reality at bay.

When I was stood at the sink, as soon as I noticed what my mind had been doing my tiredness started to lift. I felt awake again. As I had started to accept reality the energy that I’d been putting into railing against it, or just ignoring it, was suddenly available for other uses.

Along with giving us some energy back, accepting what is means that we can then give ourselves options: the more we resist reality the less options we have.

With my hands in hot water, washing the dishes, I not only saw the choices my friend had made that had upset me, but also saw his reasons for making those choices. I was also able to see the version of reality that I was trying to protect, and that it was simply a misplaced expectation.

Once I had seen more of what was real I was able to sit down with my friend and talk over what had happened in a pretty relaxed way.

One common thing that affects how well we are able to accept reality is a confusion between things that are inside our control and things that are outside our control. I couldn’t change what had happened, or my friend, but I could change my response. Many situations that we struggle with are like this, and thinking clearly about what is and isn’t in our control can help us move towards acceptance and creating options.

There’s a simple exercise I use sometimes to help with this. I create three columns in my journal, the first for elements within my control, the second for elements I can influence, and the third for things completely outside my control. Then I fill in the blanks.

Anything that brings us closer to seeing what is really there is a good thing. The more clearly we can see, and accept what is in front of us, the more likely we are to be at ease with what is happening and to make a good response.

To book a therapy or mindfulness session, email: kaspa@thebuddhisttherapist.com

A version of this article appeared in All About Malvern Hills

Taking care of ourselves in a busy world

As autumn approaches we start to feel the first trace of autumn in the air. The nights draw in and the days slowly get cooler. Trees turn from bright summer greens into reds and yellows until the sides of the roads are lined with dried brown fallen leaves.

At the same time the natural world is drawing in on itself and growth is slowing there is a sudden burst of energy in other spheres of life. School is about to begin, new uniforms and stationary need to be bought and even those of us out of academic life feel the impulse to start something new or reinvigorate our working life, hearing the echo from childhood of our own first days at school. At the same time we begin to anticipate Christmas, complaining about the first adverts on television, wondering if we have to invite the whole family around for lunch on December the 25^th and if our pockets are deep enough for everything on our loved one’s wish lists.

I sometimes feel there is a tension between these two impulses: on the one hand the quietening down and withdrawing of the natural world, which often seems to trigger some deep hibernation instinct in people, and on the other hand the excitement and pressure of new beginnings and the build-up to the holiday season.

Even in springtime when the days are lengthening and the whole world seems invigorated with life new starts can be difficult. They can bring us closer to our learning edges: intellectually as we learn new skills and emotionally as we are taken to (and sometimes beyond) the edge of our comfort zones.

How can we take care of ourselves in these situations? How can we make sure that we do not become overstretched and burnt-out, for ourselves and for others sake?

We need to pay attention to ourselves and to others. We need to look out for the clues that we are becoming too tired, or too challenged.

This kind of noticing is difficult in the midst of the business of new projects and of the frenzied world. The more we are caught up reacting moment to moment the harder it is to see ourselves and the situation we are in clearly. We thrash around like someone thrown into a pool of water stirring up silt, muddying what was clear and forgetting that we can stay afloat more easily by lying back and relaxing, than by splashing around making great waves.

It is important to make some space in our lives to be still, to allow ourselves to relax, to begin to soften the tension in our mind and bodies.

When we have found a moment of stillness or relative quiet we can then ask ourselves, “How am I doing? What’s happening in my life right now? Can I make any changes to make life easier, or better, or do I just need to sit and enjoy this moment of peace?”

Making these quite spaces is especially important as we go into busy times. It may feel selfish to take time for ourselves when the world is asking for so much of us, but these moments in which we can begin to relax and to pay close attention to ourselves and our lives will put us in a much better to position to take care of others, as much as they help us feel better in ourselves.

To book a therapy or mindfulness session, email: kaspa@thebuddhisttherapist.com

A version of this article appeared in All About Malvern Hills

How can we begin to grow?

How our relationship with our therapist leads to change

Most research that compares different types of therapy, to see which is more effective, reaches the same conclusion: the quality of the relationship between the client and the therapist is more important than the style of psychotherapy.

Putting yourself into a good relationship with a therapist is one of the most powerful ways to encourage change and growth.

Carl Rogers talked about three core conditions that enable personal growth. If the therapist can embody these qualities, he suggested, the client will naturally become more at ease, more satisfied with life, more able to take positive action. What are these three conditions?

Unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence.

No therapist embodies these perfectly, but the simple act of being in relationship with someone who is aiming to embody these, and mostly managing it, begins our process of transformation.

In my experience as a client, and as a therapist, as we begin to trust the therapist, and the space created in the therapy room, we begin to relax. This process of relaxation means that whatever we have been holding onto, or in denial about, begins to bubble up to the surface. This process is a natural unfolding. Often we experience all sorts of feelings during the process of letting go; sometimes this can even feel like grief. But in the safe environment of the therapy room, we move towards acceptance.

Professor Gisho Saiko took Rogers’ understanding of this growth-promoting relationship and added a new layer of meaning to it.

Gisho Saiko was a psychotherapist, and a Pureland Buddhist priest. He was an inspiration to my own teacher, also a psychotherapist and priest, and as I now have both of those roles, I feel some affinity with him and his ideas.

He suggested that there is some underlying existential truth, or reality, which supports the growth of each of us.

He wasn’t just talking about the space in the therapy room, but in our whole lives.

Saiko expressed this in Pureland Buddhist terms, but we could describe it as the understanding that each of us has access to some benign process that supports us and encourages us to grow.

Rogers used to use the image of a potato sending out shoots towards the light, as a metaphor for the innate potential for people to grow towards the light themselves.

Saiko encourages us to remember that the conditions for growth are present all the time. However, there is some act of forgetting (or perhaps simply a ‘not-knowing’) which means we feel cast aside, and without hope.

So the therapist’s job is not so much to embody Rogers’ core conditions, but rather to simply remember, on behalf of the client, that the conditions for growth are already here.

In time, the therapists trust in this begins to rub off on the client. Initially the therapy room becomes the place that vulnerability, and letting go, and growth, is possible, but ultimately the client begins to understand that this movement towards the light is possible anywhere – inside or outside the therapy space.

Sometimes we forget again, of course, and then it’s helpful to have good friends, or a therapist, to remind us of this basic truth.

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.com to book in a therapy session, via Skype or face to face.