My public personna here on Gaia is my inner Fool, mostly....I wanna say something controversial about the Tibet thang since it has just flagged up in my awareness and if I were a bufon I daresay I could make a joke out of it but I am not disposed to do that right now... Children in this county disappear and get murdered with alarming quotidian frequency yet the tabloids seize on a mere handful of these gut-cartwheeling situations presumably to generate newsworthy capital when sales appear to flag...likewise, there are innumerable little wars fought across the globe right as we speak which the tabloids ignore and which "serious" newspapers relegate to footnotes in the late middle age of the reading lifespan of the majority of the politically-informed readership.....the various criteria by which a story becomes front-page newsworthy to my mind remain economic and not compassionate in nature...the press seize on a VISIBLE EVENT and energise attention to it through the readership.....we all know about the anguish of Catherine aged 9's parents now she is missing these last two weeks....but not about the other five young children which went missing on the same day....likewise, we know about the strife in Tibet but perhaps not what is brewing at the mo in Bolivia because the Tibetan insurgents play the same game of using a hook to energise attention....in this case the Beijing Olympics....and the press play ball by pouncing on the whole violent debacle and turning it into frontpage tongueclicking chewing gum for the banal masses.... This planet is overrun with skirmishes, murders, torture, war, poverty and disease all woven into a painful cloth...when the press take this cloth and lend it a topography in which the upper peaks become the most newsworthy and visible emblems of this ubiquitous pain, then the press dictate the criteria by which this topography is constructed..and the american/european masses, flying in armoured airships, examining the peaks whilst munching their morning muesli, can display appropriate concern without leaving the table.... I practice Tibetan Buddhism and have an interest in what is going down there and a great deal of karuna, compassion for the indigenous Tibetan peoples... but I will not buy into putting more tonglen into Tibet than any other country currently suffering because I wish to remain a citizen of the world who attends to all the pain and who seeks integrally-informed solutions to the interwoven issues....homing in on Tibet...and many do this out of a faux concern to lend them spiritual credibility...simply buys into the very ethnocentric ethic which creates the strife in the first place.... My inner Fool...bufon to the King...would be suggesting to him that the least sartorial courtiers are equally as worthy of attention because they have interesting things to say, too...the Plantagenets loved that sort of thing.....but then they were wiccans.... I'm not suggesting we ignore Tibet but let's put it in a realistic context, huh?

There's nowhere to go.....space is within me...and space is within you, too.....is your body within your mind or within your body?.....if the latter, you are standing about three feet away from your body and looking at yourself....doinnnnng (sound of wobbly percussion)......performative contradiction alert!!!!!.....

Check it out.....what you think of your body is a set of sensorial perceptions... skandhas as the Tibetan Buddhists would refer to them.....hanging in the clear radiant referenceless space that You Are...so you cannot go anywhere...as you 'walk forwards' in life you are interpreting the forms which arise and selfliberate within this you-space as constituting a journey...actually, movement, metaphorical or literal..is illusory.....in truth, there is nowhere to go...you are already Here.....

Hence that quote by Dogen that i don't remember exactly but which sez something about there only being a tenth of an inch between heaven and hell...or enlightenment and prakritic dronesville...or whatever...didn't do my headstand this morning...

Anyway, this is what is known as a Pointing Out Instruction and i have just ripped off Douggie Harding may he rest in bardo peace.....gonna write a book on this an' get rich and famous and live on my own subtropical island and be an enigmatic celebrity recluse like Steve McQueen was only i won't get fat like he did but then i couldn't unless i sold a franchise to MacDonalds Shitburger Co. but it wouldn't  be cost-effective cos I would be the only inhabitant on my island...me and my housekeeper, who will be played in the tantricksta movie by some GenX hottie who is probably about 4 right now......and of course the McShitburger staff who would have to feed themselves on shitburgers and coke and coconuts....and we'd spend our time pretending to be Tom Hanx surfing the incoming tides on old toilet doors and sewn-mailbag sails.... and as the sun sets fire to the sea we would sit on the littoral truth of it all rapt in awe as the zephyred sky lights up violet and spirals into the space I call I....and there's really nowhere to go when in this Place That Is The Only Place That Can Be....

Well paull down me pants, paint me testes red, stand me on me head and call me the Redcap Elephant!!!!....that was a funny old paragraph...

Have a nice day....hope Spring springs for ya

Thanx for the question Siona. x

Wittgenstein wuz a rather clever sort of chap and demolished centuries of epistemological...that's the study of how we get to know things...epistemological theory when he wrote...at the beginning of...I think...The Blue Book...."If you grant that here is one hand we'll grant you the rest"...drekking brilliant, that....hold your hand out in front of you right now....does it exist?....of course it drekkin' exists, it's right there innit!...okay; so do the buildings and the birds and the bees and the experience of sex which slides through your awareness like molten honey as you slide your hand up...up...ah...ah..

Oops.

Sorry. ...where was I?...o yes....ontological truth....that's the facticity of things existing at all...of course this begets the question of how it is we come to think about anything in the first place....boy would I like to know that one... flip over the motherboard of my awareness and dicker with the wires...I'd pull out the ones for rumpy pumpy in one crackling flash and install a timer designed to allow me to reconnect with my concupiscent consciousness in, say, August, when these saprising energies begin to wind back into the morphogenic ecofabric of the implicate subtle....

Then there's other levels of truth embedded in the ontological cement....knowing what is right and real in the relationships which...in a sense...we are...for example....somebody dear to me says something kind or rude or sexually provocative or silly and what is ontologically true is that one or more of my chakras or other bits of my energy field get impacted upon and i feel that....and i think stuff in response.....but there's that intuitive truth that has no guidebook that tells us whether what we believe about that other person's motivation is right or real or requited...and how to respond.....

This radar...partly honed through an open-hearted lifecourse, partly samskaric insight born of fortunate karma....this radar tells us when to hold fast to the rudder of our will as we flow boatlike down the  fast young river of the  lebsenweldt, the lived-world....and when to let go and let it carry us through those painful emotional rapids we need to ride out...or diving ecstatically over deep waterfalls into tairns of  moiling congruence and pleasure....and when to draw up to the boats that are others, square amidships....and when to cast off and say our au revoirs for this particular lifetime river....and when to anchor and when to hoist sail...and now I'm just in the riverworld and have lost sight of the analogy..bugger it...and...fuck me it's nine and I gotta go to work......

Finally...gosh, gosh...another sort of truth...is it true that Jackson Pollack is a brilliant painter cos you oughta see the state of my cellar when lewis has finished spraypainting his namegraffiti on the wall...splatt-o-rama.....is he a genius and can i retire on the proceeds of lifting my plarster walls canvaslike out of the den??????

Warmly, Jon xx

I cannot speak for you..I can only call out my own name into the unsulliable vastness of This-I-Am...and in hearing its echo which is not an echo but the aftertaste of the substance of this morass of joy and pain which I braille out into an unknowable future...frothed up and distorted with wordplay and comedic dance into the semiauthentic souffle that it is...in hearing my own echo, I feel a pull to move supersonically, flow directly against the sound to feel into the place from which it comes....to connect with that deeper self in the black, blind, glyptic, voracious omnipresence lying behind the walls of laughter and costumery.....to rest as the damaged, neglected, humiliated little boy I once was... curled foetally on my bed sucking his thumb for scant solace against the downstairs neverending fucking rage and violence.....the days of being stepped over....

And to connect here in this hard hurt...in the hope that, as Octavio Paz once wrote, the last tear is of joy...but not yet...to weep for my own lost motherlove...and to spend the next decades of adulthood armoured with intellect and mirth and sweetness desparately attempting to recapture love in ways which frankly undermined the possibility....to connect with the compassion I feel for this very bright and open litle lad... for the things which should not have been done to a little boy...for the damaged parents doing the best that they could but not not not fucking good enough.....

To connect with the texture of this pain and enter fully into it so that this hurt is not a hurt but a power...a source....to connect with this power and to act directly from it as a martiall artist acts directly from the hara....to connect with the raw authenticity of this place as my centre is to be real...and when I am real, then everything I do and think and say are real...and how much more caring for myself and for you and for all the other part-lost, part-beloved others is that?

I will shortly go back into my therapy room with that little boy nestled securely... covered by a warm quilt spun from a deep warm heart...and gather all the neglected children I come across to share the space....

Thank you Robert Augustus Masters.

And also those of you who have ever written to me, made  nonharsh comments on these blogs and encouraged and stroked the cerebral mechanisms which make me just a little cleverer and more distant and therefore just that bit less caring....I will explain myself a little more perhaps, in future.

Namaste....Jon xx

The gift I give...what I have been given this time round in the form of early trauma and gradual recovery...and in the courage to seek out and embrace my healing fiercely and fearfully...enables me to act as a potent healing force to those younger than myself, either chronologically or emotionally....and my own elders/teachers/healers can see this to be so...

I do not expect anything back from my son...or my clients... for committing to stay with them in their joy and fear and hard hurt....but I hope that they pay forward the thoughts, words and deeds from their healed selves to the next generation....and on those occasions when I see that they do this, I experience value and dignity and selfworth and gratitude for the opportunity to  initiate this paid-forward chain-reaction of real (not idiot) compassion which streams socioeconomically and morphogenically into the wellsprings of the lebsenweldt... the lived-reality... shorn of that conceptual word-driven jive...

The true gift is always found in the wake of paying it forward.....there's nothing in the next generation's boat for us but boy can we surf on the fishtail of the waterwake...Jon xx.

When I am in touch with that deep clear potent essence at the heart of my being which fills me with myself, melting numbness and pain and that acheing sense of incompleteness which moves me to find something to fill myself with...alcahol, cancer sticks (twenty psychopaths in a box...you can be certain of them...they'll always fuck you up), sex, romance.....when I am filled...as I feel now in the wake of serious tectonic shifts culled in a RAM intensive.....then I have no craving for something outside myself...although I do and can seek out and enjoy the healthy pleasures which life can bring....and, as Leroux sez, sip them, not down them in one heady draught....that's the essence of tantra whose peripheral focus on more accomplished sexual technique only skirts the deeper realms of the essence from whih a kosmically-congruent, attuned desire springs...Jon xx

In "life" there is an "if"......as we feel forward into a tesseractish future there is the hesitancy the uncertainty in the return of each foot to the track that our leg will bear our weight or the ground doth not camoflauge quicksand...I am faithful to uncertainty...I do not know what the next moment will bring and recognise the futility of grasping...but I am not a slave to the if in life....I keep my heart open...to generate as a strange attractor for the syntropic positive whoopapallooza of the joy and love and whoopppeeee tango that  meeting the if in life with courage can entail...Jon xx

I guess this would be the inspirational beacon-being beckoning me with an  invitation of rapid resonance raising rather than a New Flame pulling me in like a testosterone-filled moth so I will cite my mentor and supervisor Keith Tudor whom you can Google and read....Keith is a metatheoretical polymath who is inspiring me to prepare and write academic stuff for journals and maybe books....so that i can secure a sound reputation before moving on to enact my passion for integral psychotherapy through writing a treatise or two...Keith wears a barbate open-hearted bright-blue-eyed countenance and uses words of less than 17 syllables and never pathologises me....his standpoint, as far as therapy methodology is concerned is to eschew the cathart-o-rama of the lower fulcrum emetic in favour of treating clients like grown-ups hence allowing the lower fulcrum enclaves of pain to release like silent farts in the face of the deep congruence he posesses...works for me..and indeed for my own clients although I often do wrestle with my clients and get them to shout.....

Funny how I am talking about Keith and not Robert Masters here who operates from the other end of the same stage...will have to think on this....

Oh, and....new flames can be deeply inspirational too.....it's not all rumpy pumpy (ah finally got sex in)....although this celibate being...well....well.....

Through clitterfields of numbness and pain...over hills and dales of short-lived pleasure...through the metropolitan boulevards of seduction and disillusionment and finally finally finally  out out over the open, lush and barren lands of spiritual promise...out and over these myriad shifting landscapes to  soar over the abyss...and then to take the courage  to dive dive dive into the scary depths.... of Relationship.... of  the breath taking the prana down deeply into the lovelorn gut... into the sunray that exposes the raw shame that keeps the vulnerable communion interface stiff with fear...into the melting dissipative glorious scream of affirmation...into the challenge of remaining open to the Other in the rich loam of connexion with the Beloved...fearless hands feeling out holding places in the frostweathered cracks splitting the mountain that shame is....and wresting stoney handfuls of the stuff out of the hard sharp igneous cliff...

And then there's the final surrender...a drunken transfusion of love and silence into a bloodstream irritated and irrigated by all the toxic shadow pathologies...and my heart leads me to this warm sunstrewn sweetness of naked self-acceptance...and only then and there is relationship really possible....Jon xx

Once you have outgrown the shopfront of  flowers, meals, chocolates and sexfest it's time to step fearlessly into the shop and contend with the storeowners mild lapses of that civility calculated to keep you there and keep you buying.....and to enable your own, if that keeps you congruent with your authentic self....and then gradually the two of us wander into the back storerooms of untidily-stacked goods, maybe a few fags stinking in a hidden ashtray, thick dust cloying the shadowself....

So then it's spring-clean time if you wanna have a really grown-up relationship...never mind the glossy bullshit now and never mind the codependently-inclined masses who would conspire to back sheepishly out of this space and return to the shop windowfront to fuck it all better in a bed that feels...well...slightly more asmell of fear......

No, if you are really going to show somebody you love them, you stay in this place...stay and fling open the shutters...binbag the ashtrays and old beercans cos you won't be needing the anaesthetics any more except for the odd enclave of fun....and kick up the dust in the act of sweeping it from the shadows.....

That dust...if not dampened down by the milk of human kindness...the willingness to commit because there's a chance that the two of you have enough capacity for Truth...the honesty of the emotional warrior prepared to show up and stay present.....that arid dust will fly in a cloud of self-righteousness and send both parties into anaphalactic shock...there needs to be the framework of trust and a pledge to meet your lover's relational needs with fidelic, consistent, grounded strength and determination...if your honesty gets the other running out of the shop then you have just saved yourself ten years of misery and an acrimonious divorce in which the anger-stamp collections which have been thrown into that crepuscular unattended storehouse out back have transmogrified into demons who burst through the shop and leave it blown open in splinters of glass/wood grief and victimisation and stupid stupid fucking games and don't i fucking know that one......

Spinoza said that love was an action rather than a passion  and he was right....I personally will never again settle for one of those plastic relationships which look like the real thing but are bereft of juice....being actually seen by the other is an often  discomforting process but why would you want to do anything other than draw relationship into your spiritual path because isn't manifest existence a cluge of relationship?...some systems theorists maintain there are no things only relationships....anyway....

I suppose then I am saying that I express my love through my authenticity 

I am seeking to become all that I can be (Katherine Mansfield's definition of health)....and what I will become is not what I seek to become because the Inner Guru, Great Goddess or Kosmos (that's God in the first, second and third person....if God is All then we need all three lenses)...where was i ...o yeah....what I will become is not what I seek to become because God has this habit of standing before me with this big leery grin...hands behind back....big sopping wet fish in one hand, soft velveteen rose in the other.....I do stuff and She either wafts the rose under my cute little nose with the cancerian bump...or she fucking WHELLPs me in the boosh with the fish...I cannot try to say the right thing to get the rose.....

Why?...She seeks to decommission the attraction/repulsion mechanism which keeps me locked in the samsaric prison...both rose and fish are instruments of a compassionate, liberating intelligence which seek to operate in, on and through me...each frustrative grunt fuelling my telos...

What I once sought to become was a shiny bloke who could attain samadhic states and be a stepfordised guru...now i want to be a real man with all my chakras switched on and the energy flowing up and out of my crown like them big baroque fountains in Les Jardins de Fontainebleu...I want my heart and head wired up together with my cojones...I want to meet you and see what we have in common, not what sets us apart....I want to promulgate ken Wilber's Integral Vision because it's the best conceptual lens going and potentiates immense benefit for all of us....I want to teach yoga in a way which connects people with their juice, not reinforce their inner walls....I want to meet you standing straight as a poolcue, not scrunched up with fear and shame...

I wanna become myself....and becoming is a neverending process....

Thanx for the question, Siona xx

I'm trying to suppress a grin at the synchronicity of this question being asked given my offgrid life right now.....

Conflict is a necessary part of life when couples, families, tribes and nations individuate.....jostling is uncomfortable and it's so easy to cower or tell the other to go fuck themselves.....really, I think the only way to stay with it is to stand back from it and see what is actually going on....resolution is predicated from maturity of insight as the brightest pearls are won by diving to the deepest seabeds...

Conflict at one level is cooperation at the next  (Lewis Gilbert, speaking of eco-systems)

Jon xx

That would be when Spammy my evil twin invites himself round to ensconce himself in Tantricksta Villa for a month or two...he lies back on the Chesterfield like fucking Nero expecting everybody to peel him a grape...and he drinks my finest  Alsacienne wines and amuses himself by throwing kiwi fruit hard at Satan my chihuahua so Satan think's he's a spunky extra in an X-Men Movie...the swans instinctively dislike him and try to give him a nasty peck on those infrequent forays into the garden and I have to check my baseball bat collection every time he leaves the house...

It's a pain having to take a permmarker to the absinthe bottle and keep the windows open to let the chainsmoked havana smoke out of the door and sweep up all the M and M's off the lino that bounce off his face cos he's trying to look cool throwing them into his fat gob like Bruce Willis does with fags in the wonderful but sadly-flopped Hudson Hawk....and enduring the chinese concubines who swim in and out of the house and the taoist sex war cries emanating from the guest bedroom... and the snidey-snide comments about my yoga practice as some sort of woo-woo leftfield prima donna act....and the habit he has every drekking time of drawing glasses and goatee on my favourite portrait of Ken Wilber  that hangs above the chippendale mantlepiece in the Heroes and Archetypes Room on the sixth floor of the Spiral Wing....

And of course, i do let him stay and put up with him  because he's my greatest teacher....never mind the quiet chakra meditations and the headstands and the pranava-belching tibetan singing bowl tintinabulation and the soft gentle caress of the Divine against your inclined cheek....the acid test happens when the miasmastic  script-cankered hooligans get right in your face and upset your apple cart.... will you enact those reactive go-fuck-yerself patterns that keep the dance of Lila so sadly predictable?....or will you pause and bring yourself back onto your path when you feel the suppressed fury of a Stage One Saturn Five rocket  tank after the gantry has fallen away....???....

I am indifferent in that time between recognising my reaction to Spammy's atrocious behaviour and generating authentic buddhata for him..it's always that way with me....I'm up against my anger...I cease to physically react to it...then I get inside my feeling of anger and of course it is delicious and it pumps me up and has a full throated roar and looks and feels like molten fire and as Robert Masters says, real rage is as close to ecstacy as anything else when expressed unreservedly....

So when I am feeling my way into my reaction around Spammy, I take back the projection and own it....and in this moment, I am indifferent to him....not reactive, not equanomous, just indifferent....whilst i go inside for a mo....witness the emotional energy...and then the witnessing process itself lends something else to the process....a seeing-through the veil of reactivity like it was a soiled lampshade....and moving behind it...

 in towards the Light...and now the Light penetrates the reactive energy-essence as it always does...wot wiv that you are seeking being the very thing causing you to seek etc etc...but being aware of that introspective act in an honest open enquiry can precipitate awareness of the  emptiness of act and energy-essence and pow....equanimity...when I'm back out there and Spammy's in my face reeking of cheroot and vodka revelling in the time he squonked me on the backgammon table for £594 when we were kids...when I am back out there I see not an animal threat but a drama unfolding with myself having the freedom to choose any role I want to choose....indifference melds into equanimity...and to be able to do this  engenders as much karmic benefit as any seated vipassana...probably more...

Working on this is fucking seriously difficult I find...when I care about folk and perceive that they are pushing my buttons, I do not always step back in the moment and can be a total asshole.... like the rest of you good folk, it's work-in-progress....

Gotta go now..Spammy's challenging me to a game of Othello we play on a 512-square board on the third floor....tenner-a-point differential...boy am i gonna whop his ass.......

Jon xx 

My experience of apologising is of shame and remorse...these are moments of heaviness and contraction shot through with sadness and contrition...I don't like to consider myself as having hurt or damaged somebody or something....and this consideration has two sides...my empathic feeling for the other's pain and my own inner dislike of shrink-wrapping myself around my own reactivity with no space for reflection and modification...when highly stressed or emotive I can be impulsive and capable of foolishness...

My relationship to apology is to freely give it once I have determined whether it is justified....also to accept it when others bruise me...it's an uneasy relationship, me and apology....rather like being adopted and  having an older, bigger and somehow better brother genetically related to our parents...  I love him dearly and he looks out for me but maybe just maybe the great Mother and Father have just that bit more emotional investment in him and i'm ambiently disturbed by that notion.

Whilst we are on the subject of apology, I should mention that innumerable professional and personal issues fed through the grinder of a deep and penetrating cathartic therapy weekend have churned me up quite a bit of late...and if you have felt that my comments to your blogs or  posts across the two dozen discussion sites I post up on have been angry, tetchy or disconcerting, then I offer my wholehearted apologies to you...I never think before I post comments or add to discussions and so whatever goes into them may at present be laced with emotion hidden from my own purview...in future I will think before I write...if this applies to you, please contact me privately and I am willing to evaluate and then offer appropriate contrition.

Warmly, Jon xx

Yes.

As a child, I moved towns five times and school seven times. I was bullied on a near-daily basis almost every schoolday. I still don't know how I set myself up to justify playing the victim.

Anyway, I am nobody's victim now. I value myself enough, most of the time.

I underestimate myself....my own capacity for pain...the right kind of pain...the kind of pain which I'm feeling right now and has me on fucking fire....the kind of pain which grounds me in the cathedral's nave and allows me to look up as I genuflect...looking up and up and up and out...not into a two dimensional inspiring biblical fresco.... but out into the deep depths and soaring cyclopean vastnesses of Godhood within Godhood.....

...and the deepening understanding that whether I sit into the heart of this pain... or open my chest and spread my arms into calvary cross-screaming love and atonement and throw my raw head back and weep with furious juice-dripping laughter and look out into the blue sky beyond theology's roofing masonry (however vast)....whichever direction I go, I see the same Essence, the same Immutable Body of Christ or Emptiness or Brahman or Shivaic Astigmatism or whatever you want to call it in the name of a shackling and safe Reason...I see the same Essence in different clothing like watching Nicole Kidman or Sean Penn from one film to another demonstrating an integrity and tensility Stanislawski would have loved to have witnessed... I see how I am at once a part of Kosmos and apart from it all in closely-spaced moments of alternating current...the duality of which blurs and generates Divine Ambivalence and then sublimates into this Cathedral building and that  rectory garden without...

I underestimate thie power of whatever it is within me that wants to write and write and write without pause...which I conceptualise as the trickster archetype activation but which feels far more than that right now...an illimitable something in me which now erupts out of pain and the magma slough of the opened narcissistic wound now visible as object to my subject...sigh of relief....enfin!...and now it is time to move from the world brailled out from words to the world without words and take a long  walk and see if I can snapshot this pain...which in the process of writing here has recouloured into something more like joy... with a visual objective correlative which I will add to this  post later so  the ending will be  at the beginning...a last a long a ...whatever can't remember...a riverrun pst Eve and Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay....

I looked at this question and I thought "How can I answer it in a completely novel way cos all them good gaia folk will wax eloquently on the ole dualistic metaphysics and the ole emotional distancing stance".... and blah-de-blah-de-blah....and I think that it's that need to stand out and entertain which has kept me emotionally separated out from others...you, gentle reader...

I was a precotious child....i could speak in well-formed sentences at nine months and at two I was capable of listening to Alan Freeman's Fab Top Forty, remembering all the placings and eidetically recalling all of the songlyrics....my three neighbourhood cousins, in their early-to-mid teens, would come and ask me what was at Number Four and could I sing the lyrics so that they could learn them.....this was 1960-1, the heady days of british skiffle, Lonnie Donnegan is God...the first crop of manufactured pop idols...Joe Brown, Mark Winter, Heinz....anyway I have early memories of kneeling on the large hardwood table in our lounge singing in a clear pitch- and rhythm-perfect voice and staring them smack in the face and Doing the Biz.....they invited their friends and I began to have this teen audience thing going on until my mother stopped it because she was rather obsessive and so many folk tramping round are prone to knock the setee out of position....

There were the spinster sisters down the road who played duet piano whilst I stood on a similar table and sang the Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day which my mother subjected me to...the similar stuff going on when my parents threw lavish parties and my father would sort of challenge me in some way which process culminated in my embarking upon some performance to which he would often  add subsequent derisory remarks for a cheap laff....

These were the times in which I felt connected to people...usually when I wasn't performing, I was ignored, in hiding or abused...so I was always separate and alone and only closer to others when "projecting balls" to use that seventies rockcritic jive.....

I'm still comfortable with being idealised... although I have  far healthier and much more authentic relationships with those in my orbit than  I had before embarking on the therapeutic journey in 1996...as a yoga teacher (and teaching yoga is what i do bestest in all the world) and as a therapist, I get these can-do-no-wrong vibes.....

The thing is, as Heinz Kohut, founder of Self-Psychology wrote......in any idealising transference, there are always strands of malice....whoever puts you on a pedestal also wants to kick you off it....how true...I have enacted this process and have had this process enacted in my face with disasterous consequences on occasion....

And central to my meltdown process is the letting go of this because one thing I have learnt very recently... painfully and bitterly and thankfully... is that connecting with the Other is a far more desirable experience than performing at  them...and this is seriously scary shit given that life offstage used to be so bloody fucking awful....

But..hey...warrior man brailling out an uncertain future with integrity....that's what I got going on here....blogging not to impress but to inspire....

And thank you those of you who have offered so much support here on site....it's so much easier to drop the mask when you accept the rawness of my face.

jon xxooxx