“As an irrigator guides water to the fields, as an archer aims an arrow, as a carpenter carves wood, the wise shape their lives.”
One commentator on these words of the Buddha said: ‘The glory of the human being is our ability to remake ourselves’. Do you agree? If it is true, it’s an encouraging thought for those of us engaged in the process of psychotherapy. Whatever your past, whatever your present, you do have influence over your future. Indeed mindfulness practitioners (such as the Buddha!) would also say that you can and should start now with determining your present.
That may require a conscious pause. Therapy is a choice to pause in our lives, whether they are busy or preoccupied or unsatisfactory in some way, and give ourselves space to think and feel and take stock. I sometimes offer clients the option to practise a guided ‘breathing space’ during the session – and they are always grateful for the experience. It can be guided by me, or I can point them to resources online to follow the guidance in their own time and space.
As we stop to examine where we are and how we are right now, time to think and feel is previous and essential: how are you? indeed, how are you really? what have you brought to this session? where are you in your life and do you like being there? if not, what could change?
The question is then, are you prepared to change? To which one answer might be, well, only if I think I can and there is a chance things could get better. This is where the encouraging words at the start can be adopted as an underlying principle, as an inducement to make the effort, as a recognition that you really can shape your life.
Modern neuroscientists can explain to us how are brains are ‘plastic’ and how we can mould our habitual responses into different ways of reacting, behaving, thinking, even feeling. But the starting point for any change is to know where we are starting from: so self-awareness (‘self-examination’ as some might have told us, from Socrates to St Paul to present-day psychoanalysts) is crucial. And it’s probably best carried out with someone else who can reflect your thoughts and feelings back to you and help you decide how to handle them.
Tennyson’s Ulysses is much quoted in his determination “to strive, to seek” and “not to yield“; rarely do the previous lines of the poem get an airing:
“that which we are, we are … //Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will…”
We’ve all been battered by life’s events, and only each one of us knows how much we may feel that ‘weakness’. If you have the will or indeed the intention, and if together we can boost your ambition and your confidence, then your own wisdom will enable you to shape your life as you’d like to.
Psychotherapy at Windmill Road, Headington 