What one cup of coffee can do

Is there a third way between the mindless conformism of western consumerism with its loneliness, absence of human contact, pseudo freedoms and illusion of choice, or the undifferentiated ego mass of fundamentalisms, which offers community and connection, but which ruthlessly and cruelly punishes diversity and "deviance"??

Please give me the connectedness, role allocation, and opportunities to be of service of faith communities, but without the coercion, inflexibility and need for an out group "other". Is this seeking the impossible?

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It seems to me that the term "old testament" was coined by a breakaway religion (Christianity) to protect itself - "the anxiety of influence" from the internal conflict of simultaneously drawing from, and yet delegitimising, the parent religion (Judaism)

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How to join without colluding, how to remain apart without being indifferent? Every therapist - like every human - must balance competing extremes to hit the sweet spot
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How does Murray Bowen's Family Systems theory, with its notion of the (usually incremental) intergenerational transmission of anxiety, and levels of differentiation (high differentiation = high functioning, i.e. adaptive rather than maladaptive behaviours) explain sudden zigzags in family history and fortunes??

Royalty begets royalty, but not necessarily greatness. By royalty I mean in any domain - from politics and governance, to physics, entrepreneurship or physical prowress. Why are the children of the Rolling Stones not all top musical acts? Why have Donny Gordon's children not all created entrepreneurial empires of their own? And conversely, how does a Napoleon or Rumi or Hillel or Kabir emerge from a non-descript "ordinary" family, and shine briefly like a self-powered sun?
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When Ghandiji of blessed memory said "if you follow an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth you end up with a world which is eyeless and toothless" he clearly had never been exposed to the oral law (the Talmud, which explains and expands upon the written law (the Torah). The rabbis of the Talmud unambiguously explain that this biblical verse refers to monetary compensation for damages, exactly because of Ghandi's objection...but they said it 1800 years before him.
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Who would I be without my story, without the religion of me?
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A Love Letter

Dear Immanuel

I will not with hold my love from you any more

Love and respect
Immanuel
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My next poetry collection, G-d willing, will either be called

A Way with Words

or

Skipping in the House of G-d

or

something else. 

(It may just be a collection of titles with no poems.)

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It seems that nothing - including cruelty and kindness - occur in isolation; everything is the fruit of some earlier process...that is why I sometimes have my doubts about campaigns like the White Ribbon Campaign AGAINST domestic violence against women ( but what is the campaign FOR?) because it focusses on symptoms rather than causes....Karl Marx may have got it wrong about what fundamentally motivates human beings and mobilises them, but I think he got it right (and if my understanding is incorrect please set me straight, I don't want to misrepresent his thought) that morality which does not impact on our modes of production and consumption is so abstract as to have no reality. Start now by de-commodifying your relationships...meet whoever you meet not because of their value to you in some imaginary future, but just because you both exist now...nothing to gain and nothing to loose...just sharing the vast sea of being

The importance of labelling

Labels are often decried as being destructive, and indeed often they are. People rightly see labels as ways of boxing other people into fixed roles which limit their ability to be all they can be and give all that they have to give. A child labelled "the troublemaker" or the "class crown" or "the responsible one", a work colleague labelled "a shirker", an  old man labelled as 'dirty", an ethnic minority labelled as "stingy" or "criminal" or "subversive" - these labels are ways of discounting the other, and often of holding them to the worst or least appropriate of their behaviours. They have been rightly challenged, as has been the need to assign (and reduce) people labels in the first place.

But like everything, labels also have a positive side. labels sometimes allow pople to articulate to themselves their usefulness, their value, and as such become the platforms from which people can operate more effectively in the world. They can also put other people at ease so that they have enough of an initial "take' on you for an ineraction to begin with some (admittedly arbitrary) orientation points they have in terms of their framing of you:: "Hello, I'm an...a accountant / farmer/ revolutionary / poet / in sales / fitter and turner / mechanic/ lawyer/ publisher/ social worker/ full time mom etc."

I often what label to asign myself when presenting myself to people, what label I can produce that adds value and dignity to myself, gives a comfortable sense of solidity and area of expertise. I have variously across the years presented myself (in person, or perhaps on a busines card or CV)as a student, soldier, journalist, writer, poet. scriptwriter, lecturer, teacher, film maker, wannabe filmmaker, corporate worker when I was at Liberty Life, blogger, instructional designer (for elearning) online content creator, dad, husband, cousin of, bar mitzvah teacher, Hebrew teacher, Jewish studies teacher/ children's author etc - depening on the time and context. Some of these labels ring more sexily in my ears than others, are seen as bestowing me with more dignity and value than others, as having the capacity to help create an intial orientation on the side of my interlocutor of interest or "respect."Now as I decide what ticket to present to the world next I cast around for convincing and solid labels; poet and psychotherapist; counsellor and poet; counsellor and communicator bla bla bla. Eventually I will come to something that feels reasonably solid, that reflects some of what I am and do, which i can occupy for a good few years, and which enhances my usefulness and value both in my own eyes and in the eyes of others.

It seems to me - and this is really the point of this post and the rest a long preamble - that a really useful thing that a therapist can do with clients is help them find affirming labels for themselves, even when at first this seems like a very big challenge. Not with a high functioning client who is a CEO or CFO or who has a distinct professional identity (dentist, tax consultant, architect) or commercial identity (real estate agent, commodities broker), or a "tradie" as they call them in Australia (plumber, electrician, builder) but with someone who may be unemployed, unemployable, between jobs, wrestling with an addiction, awaiting trial or post incaceration, a survivor of some kind of abuse - they too have their story and they too could benefit from a calling card. What could the card of a homeless schizophrenic be? If she sometimes manages to walk dogs, or do a bit of gardening, she could be a "household assisstant" or "botannical worker" or, if she just walks around the streets a "neighnbourhood patroller." "Survivor of domestic abuse" or perhaps just "Survivor" Street poet? Cleaner? "Evoket of compassion." "addiction expert" - the call is to get creative and find something that fits for the client and facilitates new movement. That allows them to present themselves to themselves (and then to the world) in a new way.

Obvioulsy phony and politically correct labers which try to avoid substantial work JUST with a new label are not going to do the trick. we are talking here of providing labels which are a starting point towards wellness, which help provide people with a few cms of psychic turf onwhich to stand as they try to figure out how to be usefully in the world.  
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The therapist as parent...yes, but also sometimes the therapist as witness, modelling for the client how it is to be with what arises, without acting out or suppressing, just gently meeting, being with, seeing - "the seeing is the doing" (Krishnamurti)
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Psychotherapy is like poetry; there are more people teaching and offering it than those who want to consume it....as it says in the Talmud "more than the calf wants to suck the cow wants to suckle"
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To Gerday Boyesen:

my peristaltic rythms testify 
I am ripe
so let me be harvested
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At the borders of the body-mind entity
somatic psychotherapy

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The best "therapy" (and what a loaded term that is)
happens between a good enough mother *
and her infant
in the first year
of embodied life
get that kind
and every other you receive
will just be a refresher course
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* (or father or caregiver)
 
 

Type 4s and the tendency to collude

Some type 4s, being conflict avoidant and seeking to come in to concensus, even when it is an illusory and artificial concensus, may find themselves colluding with positions that are anathema to their way of being. (This one for example.) How to reduce the percentage of collusion? See also water-and-stone

To find the delicate place between collusion and confrontation takes skill and good luck.

In the therapeutic context, its about walking the thin line between collusion and appropriate collaboration i.e the therapeutic alliance
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NB A necessary precondition for effective therapy: I am willing to loose my client (straight after this session) ie.just like the judiciary, financial and emotional independence are necessary for a therapist to be able to deliver successful therapy

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What is your physical state? how is your sleep? do you get any exercise? r u on medication? do you self medicate? do you have any addictions? (More accurate: what addictions do you have?)

Where is your life working – what wouldn’t you change? (Immediately turns the client towards a realization that their dysfunction is not omnipresent)

if therapy “works” how will your life look? What’s the result you want to create?

How will you and others know you’ve achieved this? (results of therapy must be quantifiable

How important is this proposed change to you? are you willing to sacrifice or give up anything in order to have/create it (turns the client towards thnking about their own levels of motivation, reponsibility and engagement with the therapeutic process. Implicit in the question is that clent is the primary driver of change)

“in the end (and at the beginning) people have to start somewhere”

“what’s a really usefull thing we can do right now” Immediacy – all process is postponement.