MIND MOVES Tony BatesAt a public meeting recently, a man asked: "What do you do when you find yourself in a dark place - where you feel lost and can see no way forward?"
It struck me as a very courageous and fundamental question for all of us. People offered many different suggestions, full of common sense and practical wisdom, but he remained curiously dissatisfied with their answers. Perhaps because the solutions being offered were evasive - suggesting ways he could control and soften his pain - rather than empowering him to engage with his experience.
The difficulty with self-help strategies is that what's just right for one person can be exactly the wrong approach for another. For one person, it might be important to reach out to other people for help, for another it might be wise to confront being alone. Activity might be critical to mobilise one person's energies, while permission to rest may be the primary need in someone else's life. I sensed that this man had probably tried many of the specific manoeuvres being recommended, and that what he needed was a wisdom that was less prescriptive.
When life brings you into very difficult terrain, such as feeling lost, you sometimes need something visionary like poetry to find your bearings. Poetry can bring the fiercer, inarticulate edges of experience into focus, and enable you to engage with them more fully. As Seamus Heaney put it so well, poetry "brings the meaning of experience into the jurisdiction of form". Poetry can give you a new way of thinking about the ordinary and inform the stance you take in the face of the more challenging aspects of life.
A poem that directly speaks to the predicament of feeling lost came to me recently through David Whyte. A poet of some considerable merit himself, he has been pursuing a crusade to bring poetry into the discourse of large corporations worldwide. One of his favourites, entitled Lost by David Wagoner, is based on a story that Native American elders would tell a young child in the tribe, in response to the question "What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?" A predicament that may well be a matter of life or death. It opens with the simple but startling lines:
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
In moments of painful distress, it is so easy to lose touch with the world around you and retreat inwardly to a world of self-preoccupation and despair as you try to figure everything out.
This poem suggests you do something different. It speaks of the need for a discipline of silence and alertness in those moments when you find yourself adrift. To first of all admit to yourself that you are lost, rather than continue to push forward regardless. To stop and pay attention to your experience and treat it with a profound respect, as you would a "powerful stranger", who might suddenly appear from nowhere and stand beside you.
The poem invites you to honour your subjective experience of darkness, but without losing touch with those elements in your outer world that can ground you. In this way you don't drown in your own inner pain, and neither do you become lost in compulsive attempts to distract yourself. It is in and through the conversation between the raw elements of your life - your intuitions, losses and desires, on the one hand; your work, friendships, and the natural world on the other - that you discover who you are and the particular way you belong in this world. The poem closes with the lines:
Stand still. The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
In a time of crisis, good friends can help you to stand still and remain open. A good friend is someone who appreciates that you are in a tough place, but can also give you the courage to engage with your experience and not run from pain. He or she won't show you an easy exit, but extend you the support to be with your experience, and to listen to whatever it is trying to tell you. A friend will also encourage you to keep open the doors of your heart, so that life can find you and surprise you, in ways you cannot predict or imagine.
By coincidence, I was on a walk in a deep dense wood the other day with a young companion and we both became hopelessly lost. She was quite frightened, but I considered it a timely opportunity to put this poem to the test. So while she was inclined to act on her agitation and run, I suggested we stand still and pay really close attention to where we were. As we did, we noticed the sunlight coming through the trees from a certain direction, the contour of the foliage ahead of us and around us, and we felt the breeze blowing from our right. The forest knew where we were. It gave us our co-ordinates and we moved slowly and skilfully towards freedom. (See left for details of David Whyte's seminars.)
tbates@irish-times.ie
Tony Bates is principal clinical psychologist at St James's Hospital.