Counseling»

Recommendations from
Margaret McCray
Marriage
Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman
Take Back Your Marriage by William Doherty
Divorce Busting by Michelle Weiner Davis
The Truth About Love by Pat Love
Depression
Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
The Noonday Demon (2001) by Andrew Solomon
Anxiety
The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook and Beyond Anxiety by Edmund Bourne
Buddhism
A Path with Heart (1993) and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (2000) by Jack Kornfield
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat Zinn
Peace is Every Step (1991) and other books by Thich Nhat Hanh
My most oft-recommended book
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality (1990)
by Anthony de Mello
This book is a deceptively easy read, so read it more than once, the second time slowly. The text is transcribed after the author’s death from talks he – a Jesuit priest from India – gave at retreats. Do not be put off by his strong personality. He has MUCH wisdom to offer us.
I often recommend books as part of therapy. I believe that books such as novels (a current favorite is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson) and essays (a perennial favorite is anything by Barry Lopez) and poems touch and awaken us in ways that can change us. I share of few of my favorite poems and essays below.
Poems
Keeping Quiet
….If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death….
- Pablo Neruda

Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
-Derek Walcott

You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you
long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth,
for the hour of new clarity.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi

The Seven Of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants will flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes underground.
You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under you feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like a squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrow and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
After the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
-Marge Piercy

Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop
the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail a letter and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
-Naomi Shihab Nye

Essays
“Thin Air,” by Margaret McCray, as printed in Thin Places, Nov./Dec. 2000 (a newsletter of the Spiritual Growth Community of Westminster Presbyterian Church)

I keep a poem on my dresser by Wu-Men that ends with the words “...if your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.” Why do we cloud, or as I prefer to call it, ‘clutter’ our lives/minds with unnecessary things? Whether the mess is stacked around us, or spilling out of our closets, or polluting and numbing our minds and bodies with too much of anything (food, alcohol, tobacco, work, worry, TV, the Internet) or keeping us spinning with thought and plans and duties and responsibilities, the bottom line is: We are lost in the chaos.

And what is lost is the core reality of our own true self, the very essence of our experience as a human being in this body, in this time, in this place. We build barriers of clutter and numb out our experience, out of fear, anxiety, habit, or the incessant clamor of things, thoughts and duties that we respond to mindlessly.

I remember as a young girl and teenager, I was plagued with the belief that I was clumsy, unathletic, slow and uncoordinated. I soothed these painful feelings that made me appear shy and standoffish by walking off the playground or indulging in intellectual pursuits that came more easily for me. My beliefs persisted into adulthood and I found myself envious of women who could look graceful, powerful and accomplished in physical activity.

Then I went to the Himalayas. Somewhere I found the courage to sign up for 28 days of trekking, most days going straight up or straight down (and always up again!) and into thinner and thinner air. My uncertain and cluttered mind bombarded me with the information that my clumsy body couldn’t do this ... and yet I did (because, frankly, I had no choice in the middle of the Himalayas!) I pushed on. I tolerated the feelings and thoughts that before I had found too painful to face. They became just thoughts and feelings. I walked on. And bit by bit I found those thoughts of being slow, clumsy, weak and uncoordinated dissolving and dropping away. I was free. I was free to put one foot in front of the other, free to breathe the thin air of 12,000 feet, then 14,000 feet, then 17,000 feet. Free to be fully present and uncluttered in a landscape that words will never capture.

Thin air, thin places. These are metaphors for where we meet ourselves, and where we come face to face with God. Nepal offers a ready-made place for thinness, a place not so easy to find in the fatness of the Western/American landscape. As a pastoral counselor I strive to offer a space of thinness for others, where feelings can be felt, named, and even exchanged in a safe, non-judgmental environment. Prayer is another means to provide for ourselves a space where we can dare to drop the clutter and risk naming what we feel, who we are.

In his book Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, psychiatrist Mark Epstein writes, “Emotions, no matter how powerful, are not overwhelming if given room to breathe...(by) desensitizing ourselves to our fear of our own feelings (we break) down the self imposed barriers that keep us at a distance, not just from each other, but from ourselves.” That desensitization comes with the courage to feel, and the faith that God will not abandon us, and indeed that God becomes all the more available as the air gets thinner, our steps get slower and our minds become clearer.

I will end with my favorite “uncluttering” mantra, a poem by Marge Piercy:

I will draw air deeply ‘til my lungs unfold,
My spine stands rippling like grass.
Hands unclench to touch you
And the mind’s good sky will clear.

Welcome to thin air!

“Savior At Large,” The Christian Century, March 13-20, 2002.
The author, Craig Barnes, was pastor of National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C. He writes of the resurrection story as told in John 20:1-18, specifically of the incident of Mary Magdalene reaching to embrace the risen Christ and his response, “Mary, do not hold onto me.”

“This is not my favorite part of the Easter story. If I were writing this drama, I would have included a long tearful hug, followed by Jesus saying, ‘Find the others and tell them I’m back. We’re getting out of here and going home.’ But Jesus doesn’t say that. He says. ‘Don’t cling to me.’

“Following Jesus is a never-ending process of losing him the moment we have him captured, only to discover him anew in an even more unmanageable form. Every expectation of Jesus is only another futile effort to get him back in the tomb. But Jesus just won’t stay there.

“What we long for, what we miss and beg God to give back, is dead. Easter doesn’t change that. So we cannot cling to the hope that Jesus will take us back to the way it was. And the only person who can lead the way is the Savior. But not the old Rabboni we once knew, which is only one more thing that has to be left behind. Until we discover a new vision of the Savior, a savior who has risen out of our disappointments, we’ll never understand Easter.

“The questions that Easter asks of us is not ‘Do we believe in the doctrine of the resurrection?’ Frankly, that is not particularly hard. Our doctrines bend easily to conform to the darkness, and before long our beliefs are reduced to sentimental claims about the spirit of Easter or ‘new beginnings.’ Or we make the opposite mistake of insisting only on belief in the historicity of this event. It is all just a way of begging the question. What the Gospels ask is not ‘Do you believe?’ but ‘Have you encountered a risen Christ?’

“We get the feeling that Mary was never the same after Easter. Neither is anyone who has learned that what matters is not that we be confident in our hold of Jesus, but confident in his hold of us. Seeing that, we are ready for anything.

“After the resurrection, things do not return to normal. That’s the good news. It is basic to everything else the New Testament proclaims. After seeing a risen Jesus, we see that there is no normal. Now we can’t even count on the darkness. All we know for sure is that a risen Christ is on the loose. And he knows our names.“

Surrender
From an email dated Sept. 30, 2002, sent by author and Episcopal priest, Barbara Crafton.

Crafton sends out occasional emails to all those who wish to be on her email list. She also is the author of numerous books on prayer and spirituality, all written in a refreshing, bold, often humorous, and always thoughtful manner. She may be reached at BCCrafton@geraniumfarm.org or www.geraniumfarm.org.

“We think surrender is all about losing. But spiritual surrender is really about winning: finally coming into your own by leaving off the false notions of controlling things you don’t control. I can’t become who God intends me to be until I stop insisting on being someone else.

“Until I admit to an illness, I can’t get better.

“Until I admit to a weakness, I won’t do what I must do to get stronger.

“Until I face my own sorrow and self-loathing, I’ll be trapped in the desperate fandango of self-justification, enumerating, over and over again, the twenty-five reasons why I am really just fine and don’t need to change anything. I can’t solve a problem I won’t admit I have.

“Recovering addicts have begun to do this. Active ones won’t. They’ll drink or drug themselves to death, insisting all the while that they’re doing just fine.

“People who aren’t addicts can begin to do it, too. To begin to surrender power we don’t have brings us closer to the power we can have. We can’t do everything.

“There are many things in life - perhaps most things - that we do not control. But that does not mean we have no help. It only means that our help is not just in ourselves.

“Surrender begins the relationship with God.

“How can I surrender to God?  I don’t even know if there is a God. I don’t know if God loves me. I don’t understand. How can I surrender to something I don’t understand?

“The same way you emerged from the womb into a foreign world, with a pair of lungs you’d never used, knowing not a thing about what you would find. The same way you took a job without knowing whether or not you’d like it. The same way you got married without knowing in advance what it was going to be like. Almost every major decision we make in life is a decision not primarily informed by lots and lots of good data: we have some data, but what we mostly have is trust.

“Trust in something we have no way of understanding.

“Surrender is deciding to trust God. It’s not more irrational to trust God than it is to trust other things we go right out on a limb for.

“Can’t trust God because you don’t know for sure there even is one? Neither is anybody else. The faithful don’t know something other people don’t know. We don’t have secret information. We all know pretty much the same things. Trust in God isn’t as much about knowing as it is about choosing how we will live.”

Forgive for Good by Dr. Fred Luskin – Though its title is misleading, an excellent, perhaps life-changing book on “not taking things so personally” and on letting go.
Dealing with grief or loss
Tear Soup by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen
Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
Communication/Relationships
Confidence in Communication by Ronald B. Adler
The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
Co-Dependent No More by Melody Beattie
An End to Innocence by Sheldon Kopp
The Relationship Cure by John Gottman
Anxiety/depression
Stress Free for Good by Fred Luskin and Kenneth Pelletier
The Anxiety Book: Developing Strength in the Face of Fear
by Jonathan Davidson
Wrestling With Depression by William and Lucy Hulme
Survivors of abuse
Secret Survivors by E. Sue Blume
The Body Remembers by Babette Rothschild
Secret Shame by Martha Janssen
Spiritual awareness
Addiction and Grace by Gerald May
Practicing the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Receiving the Day by Dorothy C. Bass
A reading
Wisdom, 6:12-17
I, Wisdom, am with you.
I am a light that will never grow dim.
Love me and you will see me.
Look for me and you will find me.
At the slightest indication of your desire for me,
I will make myself known to you.
Watch for me at the very start of what you are about,
And you will have no trouble.
You will find me, ever present, sitting at your tables.
Even thinking about my presence will help you.
Be aware of my presence, my concern, and my willingness
to inspire and to instruct you.
As you meet with each other,
I meet with each and all of you! 

Recommendations from Stephen Lander
Psychology Spirituality & Psychological Transformation
The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg
Let You Life Speak, Parker Palmer
The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama
Good Poems, Garrison Keillor
God’s Politics, Jim Wallis
Plan B,  Anne Lamott
A Strange Freedom, Howard Thurman
Walking the Bible, Bruce Feiler
The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong
What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills
The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner
The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner
Family Therapy
The Parent’s Handbook - STEP,  Don Dinkmeyer
Without Spanking or Spoiling,  Elizabeth Crary
Everyday Blessings,  Mylas & Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Healing Power of  Play, Eliana Gil 
Poem
Night Prayer
Lord,
It is night.

The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
What has not been done has not been done;
Let it be.

The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives
Rest in you.

The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
All dear to us.
And all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
New joys,
New possibilities.

In your name we pray.
Amen.

- New Zealand  Prayer Book  (pg 184)

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