When the world seems as troubled as it does today, and there’s such a cacophony of voices that it feels impossible to find clarity, where do you turn? I find solace in the poem Love by Czeslaw Milosw.1 Its opening lines, ‘Love means to learn to look at yourself/The way one looks at distant things’, express something about what happens in therapy: a relationship with yourself, via another, that extends out to the world. Simone Weil writes about ‘absolutely unmixed’ attention being akin to prayer, and calls for us to ‘cure our faults by attention and not by will’.2 For me, this is the very foundation of healing.
This issue gathers writers who, in different but interconnected ways, have something to say about this kind of love and this kind of therapy.
On p6 Nadia Saleem Syed writes about research in which she interviewed two men, Amar and Bandra, who have been meditating outdoors since childhood. They talked about the powerful cultural and ethical significance that mindfulness has for them, and how deeply this practice is interlinked with their spirituality. In Toolkit (p12), Gestalt therapist, Keith Duckett, uses the medium of sand to get curious about the fundamental set of movements we first make as babies. He draws upon the work of Ruella Frank and the philosophy of non-duality to reflect upon how bringing a sense of wonder to our movements has the potential to bring about therapeutic change. In Reflections (p16), Alastair McNeilage takes a poetic look at the role that reverence can play in facilitating this kind of attention in a therapeutic space.
On page 24, we get a glimpse into a process called ‘deep mapping your square mile’, which is about entering into intimate connection with the land around you. Samantha Taroni explains how we can experience this via three centres: head, heart and gut.
All of these writers call for us to bring a particular kind of attention to the therapeutic process. Freud talked of the importance of ‘free floating’ or ‘evenly hovering attention’, something beyond a left-brain, judgment-based way of witnessing.3 The articles in this issue hint at the depths that this kind of attention can reach, and the ‘correspondences’, to quote from Samantha Taroni’s article, that can be made.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes that ‘more than anything else, attention is an act of connection’.4 And, although we talk here of art and spirit, how we apply attention has been thoroughly examined from a neuroscience perspective too,3 as I discovered during a great conversation with psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jeremy Holmes. You’ll have to read the article to find out more, but as we start the new year, I’d like to share what I found most moving about what Jeremy had to say: he expressed a hope that our world can make better use of what we do in therapy – of the special, sacred kind of attention that happens there. Hear, hear to that.
Amy McCormack, Editor
thresholds.editorial@bacp.co.uk
