Enjoy Your Entanglements

Reflections- come to the launch!

Today was my psychoanalysis day: a train ride from Galway to Dublin, cycling in the rain to lie on the couch.

The times before and after the couch are as important as the time on the couch.

There is a conscious and unconscious journey travelled, an emotional and bodily processing that takes place.

Composting

I call this process composting, which means ‘putting things together’. When we think with others, human and non-human others, when things come together in our body, mind, soul; something magic happens. In gardening compost nutrients come from waste...... rich nutrients emerge to feed the plants, and likewise when we compost, nutrients feed our minds and bodies.... new life, new shoots, and new ideas come from composting......

Composting comes from the connectivity, breaking down, putting together of stuff..... Composting is an entanglement of living things.... whether in the garden or in ourselves and each other.

A while back I used to think, and was trained to think, that being a therapist and working on the self was about untangling messiness, sorting oneself out, gaining insights that would help clarify the confusion of life, heal the pain, and iron out the problems.....

Enjoy your Entanglements

Now I realise that the process is not like this at all..... it’s about finding ways to ‘enjoy my entanglements’. To do this is to step out of the victim ‘wounded-self’ stance, so common in therapy and self help. It is also to step out of modernities iron cage, to stop focusing on a utopian future where everything is in its place, where we are in control……

To take this further:

One of the major problems we face as a society is working out how to stop trying to untangle ourselves, and learn how to live well in our precarious and delicious entanglements.

Modernity has taught us that entanglements are bad, it trains us to sort out, to categorising, to put into boxes, to create borders and boundaries, to put things in their right place.....

The mentally ill go to the asylum

The poor go to the ghetto

Kings and Queens go to their palaces

Animals go to the zoo or abattoir

People go to the office, factory, or warehouse

In most westernised societies, the human place was over nature

Modernity took this a step further; nature was too entangled and wild, and like human nature, it needed taming in order for us to feel in control, and to extract what we needed from it.

But what if we embraced our entanglements, what if we enjoyed being entangled with nature rather than being above it, separate from it?

What if we enjoyed our hybridity with each other, and stopped pretending to be pure and separate races.....

Sometimes entanglements need loosening for sure; when an entanglement ties us in knots it may require attention...but don’t act without asking how the knot serves us, how it serves others -human and non-human- and you may find that the knot and the entanglement are telling you much more than you bargained for…

To hear more about Entanglements: Join my book launch, hosted by OPUS on June 15th 6pm UK link here https://lnkd.in/e4DNbbHJ

or on June 23rd hosted by Nioda for Pacific-Asia timezone https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfL_NZyToN7pryMjKuLvS3dylaXX_1vgxTkwKrQF_66S76rog/viewform

8.00 – 10.00 am Monday 23 June London 🇬🇧

5.00 – 7.00 pm Monday 23 June Melbourne 🇨🇰
3.00 – 5.00 am New York Monday 23 June (eek!) 🇺🇸
3.00 – 5.00 pm Monday 23 June Singapore 🇸🇬
12:30 – 2:30 pm Monday 23 June New Delhi 🇮🇳 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfL_NZyToN7pryMjKuLvS3dylaXX_1vgxTkwKrQF_66S76rog/viewform