Karma and Psychology

I have been away for a conference called “Creativity and Madness.” Why have an academic meeting stateside when traveling to Thailand, Hong Kong, and Bali is an option?

I presented on the “Rise of the Wounded Feminine in the Media,” using examples from various TV shows and movies, such as The Hunger Games and Whale Rider. Others presented on the culture of Thailand and psychological issues in Bali.

And where does this all converge in a Mind Matters column? I was interested in the psychological stressors and ways of coping the people had in these countries. I can only report anecdotally about the few people I spoke to—especially women. It seemed to me that men in Bali, for example, were more satisfied with life than were the women. So I wondered about the rise of the wounded feminine in the place that tourists call paradise.

While the male tour guides waxed on about how much they loved their life in Bali, for example, despite the fact that no one had any vacation time, the women I met talked about having to juggle child care with work hours. One massage therapist noted that she and her husband worked different shifts so that they could care for their three-year-old son. I asked her, with all the beaches around, if she got to go swimming much. “Oh, no,” was her reply, “we are busy with work and our rituals.” Yes, there are many religious rituals to follow each day. Every Bali home has a small Hindu temple and every day little baskets of offerings are made to place in various corners of homes and shops—these little trays of flowers and food are ubiquitous.

Rituals that support one’s spiritual beliefs aside, everyday life in Bali seemed less paradise, more hard scrabble, to me. Another woman reported that she had three daughters and no sons. That meant that she and her husband would have no one to care for them when they got old.

In Bali, the wife joins the husband’s family in their little compound. This woman I spoke to only got to visit her parents once a month, and in the event of their being disabled, she was hard pressed as to what to do. She was an only child and relied on a cousin to come to her parents’ aid from time to time. She also noted that there was little opportunity for anyone to further their education to become a nurse or a physician unless they had money. Hence, some women masseuses choose to leave Bali to work in Turkey or Russia—they then marry and remain there. Another young sales clerk I met was looking forward to settling in Finland and witnessing snowfalls with her Finnish boyfriend (whom she met in Bali) beside her.

In both Bali and Bangkok, karma and destiny constituted a psychology of acceptance of the way things are. The upside to this is that these people know full well the line of the AA prayer of “accepting what I cannot change”—and they do that with patience and humility. On the other hand, there may be a lack of “changing what I can.” We of the Western World commit the sin of hubris and entitlement, thinking we can change and control and dominate whatever we please. Yet the East may err on the side of accepting their “karmic” lot in life. Both Easterners and Westerners may need a little more wisdom to know the difference between what we can and cannot change!
Meanwhile, I would introduce the West to the Asian patience of driving sans road rage and the ability to smile and be polite in all public places. Throughout Asia we were met with politeness—Thailand is indeed known as the Land of Smiles.

Ah, but we received our literally rude awakening when we arrived at the San Francisco airport. From the United Air ground employee yelling at us to the Americans angered in the passport corral line that my husband had the audacity to want to stand next to me, we were reminded we were home. Stress up, smile and patience gone. What is our psychological or karmic story here, I wonder?

The Hidden Hunger

February 23, 2013 (3/20)

Hunger in America

Recently I attended a county mental health advisory Board meeting. I did not like what I heard: that there is a rising population of the homeless hidden among the affluent. A school administrator reported on how he encounters children every day in his suburban school district who are in need of food and shelter.

 When we hear the word "homeless" we, unfortunately, need to expand our images from the lonely man, chronically mentally ill, who has been discharged from the state hospital 10 years ago.

 Include now working families living out of their cars or hopping from acquaintance to friend for shower and bed. These are real cases in our community. We used to have strong safety nets but with the tea party tenor of the times those safety nets are being ripped asunder.

After the meeting as I drive back to my office I turn on NPR. Synchronistically, I hear being interviewed two documentarians, Lori Silverbush and Kristy Jacobson discuss hunger in America. They have just directed their film, A Place At the Table which airs in March, 2013. They noted that 80% of  the families receiving food stamps (the SNAP program) are working fulltime. In other words, many hard working Americans are not earning a living wage. These researchers also report that there are children in the schools who can't concentrate for lack of nutrition. Our brains do funny things to us when we are hungry, actually starving for the nutrients we lack even if we appear "well-fed". One little girl in the film says she is told to focus but when she looks at her teacher she imagines her to be a banana... She is malnourished. Silverbush and Jacobson cite the term "food insecurity" because the hunger may be invisible hidden in the bodies of those who are obese due to lack of proper diet and nutrition. Cheap and filling food is not usually healthy food.

Meanwhile the expectation is that churches will do it all.I am a Red Cross volunteer and I know how difficult it is to recruit volunteers. Volunteerism can be inconsistent and spotty, and we are all busy! So we expect the homeless and hungry to be cared for with stop-gap emergency measures in the basement of the non-profits. Yes, these are great assets to a community but they depend on volunteers and cannot serve everyone. Moreover, the fact that we need them in the first place is scandalous!

That the need for food banks and shelters is  on the rise is a disgrace in an affluent, developed country.The greatest nation in the world we are wont to say.

We may think, what, whoa, not in my neighborhood! I live in a prosperous county of Pennsylvania, yet on my drive from that mental health meeting, the story of homelessness and hunger was being played out before me. I noticed in the coffee shop I visited, there was a woman sleeping in the corner, big bags at her feet. I thought, hmm, this may be her safe place of refuge for a few hours. Not 15 minutes later, I noticed a man with a burlap sack on his back, other scruffy bags in hand, walking along the road. My guess is that  he is holed up somewhere in the woods between the Mc-mansion housing developments.

Meanwhile, blind to the common good, the Republicans have morphed into the most belligerent and obstinate of patriarchs, aligning only with the plutocrats. Between the wall of gilded plutocracy and the wall of leaden patriarchy, humanity is being crushed.

Remember Wonder Woman? There is a story where she and her male cohort are trapped between two  monstrous steel walls that are closing in on them. Wonder woman, of course, saves the day. But it is not the archetype of one strong goddess we need here to power away the smothering walls of patriarchy and plutocracy. What we need here is the power of the feminine principle infused in all our actions no matter what they are. The patriarchy in its rigidity is sterile callousness; the plutocracy in its greed is inflated hubris. Both can be transformed when the feminine principle of relationship and care and connection is invited in.

Diffuse Awareness or Single Focus?

Recently, I consulted at a local bank to do crisis intervention  with the employees after a robbery the day before.My experience at this intervention was not unlike others I have facilitated, particularly one where the young woman assistant manager was considered vulnerable, especially by her male colleagues. However, what I discovered  was that she was the most perceptive and aware, competent and courageous of the team.It was she who safely handled the robbery incident, picking up cues even before the event occurred.Meanwhile the men had sat at their desks unaware of what was occurring.

Again, in the more recent robbery, the assistant manager, another young woman, displayed insight.She too went on the alert early on, as she observed through the floor to ceiling windows of the bank,  two men walking towards the door.She noted her concern to the female colleague stationed at the counter with her. Her colleague agreed with her assessment.As the men entered, the assistant manager pushed the panic button. And then the robbery began with at least one of the men brandishing a gun, demanding money.Another teller, who had been working behind a wall at the drive-through window, entered from the side. The gunman pointed his weapon at her as well.The three women followed the protocol in which they were trained. During the event they were calm and competent. Their traumatic response of crying, tremors, anger, etc, arose after the  robbers left with a  small amount of money and ,fortunately, with no one harmed, at least physically.

While the robbery was in progress, the manager was present and was at a desk focused on some project.Just as in the earlier incident where the men were unaware of  the robbery, so was this man  unknowing of the events that were unfolding.

Two stories do not a truth make, but there is a trend here. And that is about how men and women may meet the world differently. Where women have a diffuse awareness,an open focus, taking much in at once, men seem more focused on one point, one goal at a time.Stereotyped as this might be, it does behoove us to see value in both modes of meeting the  world. One of my father's favorite maxims was"your virtue is your vice." In other words, without balance and moderation , virtue is handicapped.

We have lived in a goal-oriented,"blinders-on"  "man's world" for eons and it has achieved much.However,lost in lopsidedness,there is a dark side to this narrow focus.The feminine principled diffuse awareness brings enhanced perception of the world around us  and allows for the inclusion of care.

Interesting to note that  the women  I interviewed, who have experienced various bank robberies, report worry and concern for the other people in the vicinity of the gunmen. They recounted that they were concerned  for the safety of  co-workers and customers during the events. This concern was integral to their decisive responses to these incidents.What might this imply? Perhaps that feminine principled diffuse awareness  allows us to see the bigger picture of connection and relationship--even in a bank.

The Wounded Feminine rises in a den of patriarchs

January 23,2013

I admire the stamina and grace of Hillary Clinton. She is a woman of heart who needs to be --and is-- heard. She is a vigorous example of the rise of the feminine principle which has been wounded for so long.

On January 23rd, she has faced the Congressional patriarchs who questioned her for many hours about the tragedy at the Libyan consulate where state department officials were killed.While she appeared grounded, straight and direct in her reporting, the patriarchs attempted  to politically stone her with  a barrage of  whisper down the lane hearsay gleaned (too lovely a word for it) from that bastion of (un)truth in journalism, Fox News.While the patriarchs blustered with erroneous "facts,"Hillary Clinton courageously and clearly articulated how we need to learn from our mistakes, questioning what the US could do differently. Of course this question reflects directly on  Congress itself.It was Congress who denied three hundred million dollars to the state department for more security.It is these same rigid patriarchs who don't get the need for diplomacy to protect democracy.

Mixing metaphors,Hillary Clinton, unlike Joan of Arc, did not get burned at the stake at this hearing. It was she who flung the fire back at yet another set of myopic men (and women). Any fire she takes away from this hearing is the torch she carries that brings a little more light to the world.And all those rocks hurled? Will they come in handy to build  a new foundation of feminine principle?

In the Aftermath of Tragedy

12/14/2012

I sit at Talula’s Table, Christmas music straight from the 1950’s plays over the speakers, and little potted Christmas tress festooned with cotton snow and white knitted scarves line the old storefront window. A woman at another table jumps up blurting out that twenty-seven people—children—have died in a shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Fifteen more are injured. There is a cognitive disconnect between my tea and granola bar and this horrific story. I hear O Holy Night now on the sound system. Where is this new and glorious morn? Perhaps we are not falling on our knees enough or hearing the angel’s voices. Peace on earth is up to us. We can say this was an isolated shooter. Yet again another mad man not like us. We have nothing to do with this, we say. And granted there is individual responsibility in all our actions. Yet there is also a collective responsibility. What is happening on the societal level that precipitates this kind of violence?

We live in a bully universe. US drones kill indiscriminately in foreign lands. Corporations get away with greedy maneuvers that can be slowly murderous. So where is the surprise that a disgruntled individual bully carries out what the collective already has done again and again?

My diatribe will do absolutely nothing to assuage the keening and the mourning of the families in Connecticut who have been so traumatized in this tragedy.

12/20/2012

I sit again at Talula’s Table wishing Joni Mitchell were singing over the sound system her Christmas lament, because I too wish I had a river to skate away on.

The last time I sat here was Friday, December 14. The day of the massacre of innocents in Connecticut. Since then there have been numerous incidents of gun violence and children dying, although more anonymously and with no media outcry.

However, perhaps this tragedy that occurred in the midst of Christmas in an upper class quintessential New England town may be the tipping point for a change in consciousness about the pervasiveness of guns in our culture. Maybe now there will be a great turning—away from violence and truly in to a more compassionate collective consciousness.

When I manage to give meaning to the absurdity of life, it helps me not want to skate away on Joni’s river.

I also wonder if these tragedies caused most often by disenfranchised males (usually white) are not signs of the wounded feminine rising. I wonder if with the slow turning of consciousness toward a more compassionate and connected universe that honors the feminine principle that these men are raising the collective patriarchal shadow that resents this and rages against the change.

I reiterate, my philosophical musings do nothing to assuage the keening and the mourning of the survivors of the victims. Nevertheless finding meaning in tragedy is one way of reinvesting in life.

How is it that a young man uses his mother’s guns to start his murderous rampage by killing her? What is this rage against the feminine? If he projected the negative mother archetype onto his own blood, he also projected it onto the women educators who died courageously attempting to protect the children in their care. They, to me, attest to the wounded feminine principle rising even in their dying.

What is the negativity and rage we collectively carry that produces an individual who murders innocent children who represent the future and who murders the women who represent the feminine principle in their stolid compassion?

Here it is, Christmas. Whether you believe in Christ or not, the story of Herod killing the innocents in order to kill Christ can be a telling allegory of our time.

Even if we only imagine Christ as symbolic of love and compassion, we can see in him the integration of the masculine with the feminine principle. Now imagine Herod as the epitome of patriarchal power and domination, the antithesis of feminine principle. So it is that Herod feels threatened by the quiet power of loving kindness and compassion and attempts to kill Christ in a murderous rage, killing all innocent children.

I have no desire to give any specific contemporary murderer the power of meaning or motive. Yet I can’t help but ponder what we need to transform in our collective consciousness to allow the feminine principle to be no longer so wounded. We need a change of heart to embrace the feminine principle of connection and compassion. In the aftermath of tragedy, we see the feminine principle manifested in all sorts of loving acts of kindness. We hear the stories of the  acts of courage displayed by the educators, all women , who attempted to protect the children in their care.We see a nation of people connected in their heartfelt response to this tragedy..

."The beauty that will save the world is the love that shares the pain" (Cardinal Montini). May we continue to uphold the wounded feminine rising transforming grief and mourning with such care.

My Dream

I had the following dream on November 16, 2012. Dreams can bring validation and clarity to the collective consciousness/unconsciousness as well as to the individual's psyche.I consider this dream to carry a message to be heeded. Here it is:
      
                 I am in a group. In one corner is an older woman, Mary. She wisely states how all the talk of fiscal cliff is wrong--the rich just need to pay taxes to begin with. People are making this into something it doesn't have to be. 
                 Mary  is quietly speaking in the corner;the group doesn't really hear her and they are crying fiscal cliff cliches.
                I tell the people:"look,my son argues that the fiscal cliff is a bogus issue, that the deficit is not the problem at all what we are led to believe it is.Wise woman Mary, whom we need to listen to, says' tax the wealthy and the problem will eventually resolve.we got here because we stopped doing that very thing'.
                A man in the group is incredulous. But I keep hammering at the idea that the fiscal cliff is about lemmings--just following over the cliff because they aren't thinking about the consequences, of the larger picture.
                The bottom line is about the extent of poverty and the vast dichotomy of the rich and poor.There is no fiscal cliff. We have created a bogus issue because the powers that be want to dissolve government and taxes and want nothing more than to keep the money to themselves.
                I say all this. I don't know if this group in this room gets it. 


I hope we  all listen to the wisdom of our dreams and carry their message of our souls into our waking life.

The Presidential Debate

Yes, I watched the debate last night and was admittedly wishing that President Obama would have  had the energy to tackle Gov Romney more forcefully. However, what all the pundits and reporters left and right seem to be  mesmerized by is the costume not the content.The  costume worn for an early Halloween by Romney was that of a caring conservative. Sorry, Romney these days that is an oxymoron.  With mask on tight, Romney energetically and smilingly shared that CURRENTLY no one on Medicare or  social security need worry. That is, if you are over 60 you are safe from the Republicans sword-slashing of "entitlement" programs that we all pay for.Obama did nail him on that one as he looked directly at the camera and  said to pay attention if you are in your 50's!

Romney, with slick and  smirky smile, kept referring what the federal government would no longer do. He kept sending everything back to the states to take care of..He was given the opportunity by Obama to speak his agenda and when he wasn't  lying about the math and the facts, he clearly stated how he was dismantling the federal government and was not raising taxes on the rich and how he was expecting the states...those bankrupt bastions of inconsistencies and inequality..to take care of the commonweal.....right....righter....rightest.

For the wounded feminine principle to rise, we need to recognize the need for leaders, both men and women, who see our interconnectedness and  care about the common good. Obama appears to be a feminine principled man at heart; Romney, under his mask, is not.Remember content not costume is what is most important. My vote is for the feminine principled man.