I’m in deep now, never been this deep before
The world’s hollow like a shell and I’m out its door.
In so deep, the ocean has its own startled floor.
I’m down, down. down. never been so dark , so more

I can’t rightly tell how I got where I am
I think I had an accident, fell over, then I swam.
Sometimes it’s a loss, be times it’s my man.
I guess I have to   stay   till my time is done

I don’t know if the joy is worth the pain
Would I choose to relive it, if I was born again?
The dark joy is the amazing gain.
But the sorrow is  damn sad, let’s admit it plain.

I’m in deep and it’s over my head
What was I thinking of, when I fell  out of that bed?
I look up and  the sea’s so  turquoise like  that mist   is red
When we get good and mad and wish some loon was dead.

At first, it was all just black, black pain
But from the bottom of the  well, I looked up with awed love again.
That’s when I recalled, feelings are plain and sane.
Joy is much greater when we’re in the danger zone.

I dunno if I’m   ever comin’ out.
We can’t control it , ain’t that what life’s all about?
I’ll never love with innocence again ,nor not feel doubt.
But I’m no teapot and the devil ain’t got my spout.

I’m swimming and the ocean’s so mysteriously bright
Down here we don’t have no day nor no night
Fish nudge me with  big grins  and   teeth white
Sea flowers fondle me and whisper, turn off that light

The energy that binds our parts to one
The creation of the world and then of man
The energy  of all our nuclear bombs
The sacred space  inside, the very womb

The space where we will die and fall  to earth
The sins we hid inside , our  dangerous worth
The heart which came too hard and  cracked and bust
The little pieces left that  turned to dust.

The hunter lusts to  shoot and kill and eat
The bodies of  gnawed wolves around his feet
The men who  save no  children shatter peace
The eyes of Jesus speak, the drum  still beats

The end is the beginning as we move
In spirals that say nothing of our Love

This is the most popular piece of  classical music in the UK

Where’s your passport, where’s your alibi
Murder has been done and there’s a War
I’m the Lamb of God and he’s my Pa.

All the angels gave a gulping sigh
Jesus ,don’t go back, you go too far
Where’s your passport, where’s your alibi

Even Satan seemed   annoyed and jarred
Take away those leaders and their Whores
There’s the Lamb of God and his old Pa.

What’s my crime ,sweet Jesus, should I lie?
The Market’s bust and you are going to die.
Where’s your passport, where’s your alibi?

We had a  powerful sacrifice bizarre
We killed God and then we  wore his Stars.
Where’s the Lamb of God,oh,ahaha!

The world is reddened by the blood of man
On the nursery slopes,   this War began
Where’s your passport, where’s your alibi
I was the Lamb of God but where’s my Pa?

The spaces once held sacred are destroyed
Like Salisbury plain where sheep  could safely graze
Now for soldiers  use and practice Wars

The Bedouin  who inhabit deserts cry
The Negev is no longer a free space
The places  for creation are destroyed

Before the birth of Christ, they wandered by
Their little tents and camels no disgrace
Deserts are  for democratic ‘Wars

To shepherds and their flocks we say,Good bye.
The land is used for shooting, so debased
The places  for creation are destroyed

The Lamb of God  is fined and unemployed
Search for peace, be treated with distaste
Deserts are  for  practising new ‘Wars

Of  the Spirit,  is there any trace
As the Lord God turns away his Face?
The spaces once held sacred are destroyed
Now for soldiers  use and  final Wars

http://www.skylightto.com/interviews/dr-donald-carveth-guilt/

Beginning:

David Hare’s critically-acclaimed 1999 play Skylight tells the story of Tom and Kyra, reunited several years after the painful end of their secret love affair. Both struggle against guilt, and their parallel torments are manifested in ways that reflect their diametrically-opposed political worldviews. A 2015 Broadway production starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan was nominated for seven Tony awards, suggesting that audiences are still connecting with this narrative about the destructive consequences of guilt.

In fact, guilt and shame are hot topics all over these days: researcher and author Dr. Brené Brown gave a brilliant TED Talk on vulnerability, in which she describes her own experiences with shame. With over 25 million views, Brown’s is one of the top-5 TED Talks of all time. Brown’s view is that, “there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done, or failed to do, up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort. I define shame as the intensely painful belief that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior.”

It’s arguable that Toronto’s resident expert on guilt is Dr. Donald L. Carveth, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, registered psychotherapist, and author of “The Still Small Voice; Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience.” Don views Skylight as a skilled study of the effects of guilt.

I sat down with Don to discuss the play, literally on his comfortable therapy couch. He occupied his own seat of analysis, a sturdy armchair tucked, appropriately, below a large portrait of Freud.

Nicole Stamp: Don, how do guilt and shame figure into your practice? 

Donald L. Carveth: Majorly! I wrote the book because the themes of guilt and shame just became so central to the work that I do with patients. With symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, and depression, often people are directing aggression at themselves because they feel guilty about something that they may not even consciously know they’re guilty about. 

Do you identify a difference between guilt and shame? 

Yes I do. There are two main types of guilt: The first is punitive guilt, in which “I’m whipping myself”, and that’s almost indistinguishable from shame, which is a narcissistic emotion. In shame, my mind is entirely on myself. We often think of selfishness or narcissism as focusing on “how great I am” but it’s equally narcissistic to be going on all the time about how terrible you are. Shame is self-persecution. It’s a horrible feeling. You beat yourself up, and once in a while, in order to stop beating yourself up, you beat somebody else up- that’s the scapegoat mechanism. When I’m depressed, my superego has me in its crosshairs, but if I can shift someone else into its crosshairs: “That guy over there is the sinner, let’s attack him instead of attacking me.” People can get relief from depression by targeting somebody else. All of this is destructive guilt.

But there’s another kind of guilt altogether, which is reparative guilt: your mind is not on yourself, it’s on the person you’ve injured. The move into reparative guilt is a move out of narcissism. We get our minds off ourselves long enough to actually see the harm we’ve done to others, and to be concerned about them, and to want to do something to make it right.

The example I use is, “I’ve injured someone, and he’s bleeding in the corner. With persecutory guilt or shame, I’m flagellating, I’m such a terrible person.” But that’s useless to the guy who’s bleeding. If I put down the cat-o-nine tails, go get the first aid kit, and start bandaging- that’s reparative guilt.

Anything to declare, they  bluntly asked
Gold or silver, drugs stuffed up your ass?
Just war, the shadow answered, that’s my task.

Do you believe a  just war can exist?
You’ll find that out when you have let me pass.
Anything  else,  they bluntly, coldly, asked

No, nothing, you can search me if you must.
My declaration,  reason has surpassed
More wars, the figure ranted, that’s my task.

I declare the world is  done and bust
Though Jesus died and  we’ve just been to Mass.
What did that do for Hitler, the guards asked?

What we choose has existential risk
As if we  live enclosed in walls of glass
Bombs, the figures chanted, they’re our task.

Shall we let these strange, black figures pass?
War is coming, guns and poison gas
Anything to declare,  the guards  just asked?
Another war and starting it’s unjust

https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/alpha-elements

About 10 years ago we were on holiday and drove to Southwold.
I was wearing a dress, sunhat and sunglasses so not much of my face was visible.We parked in a street near the sea front.When I got out of the car, three men who were painting a house began to sing  very loudly some opera.It may have been,O sole mio.
Now, should I report this to  the police? I fear they won’t believe me  and my husband  didn’t do anything to protect me  like suggesting I wear a Niqab [Is that right?]
I doubt if it happens nowadays anyway!

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!
The air is serene after a storm,
The air is so fresh that it already feels like a celebration.
What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!

But another sun, even more beauteous, oh my sweetheart,^[10]
My own sun, shines from your face!
This sun, my own sun,
Shines from your face; It shines from your face!

Your window panes shine;
A laundress is singing and boasting about it;
And while she’s wringing the clothes, hanging them up to dry, and singing,
Your window panes shine.

When night comes and the sun has gone down,
I almost start feeling melancholy;
I’d stay below your window
When night comes and the sun has gone down.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-44313130

http://www.blakearchive.org/

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/visions-william-blake

“In 1779, Blake began his formal art education at the Royal Academy of Art’s Schools of Design, where he was encouraged to study painters such as Rubens instead of the Renaissance works that his teacher called “stiff and unfinished.” Blake pursued his own artistic goals, and a short time afterward published his first book of poems, Poetical Sketches.

In later works, including Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, the engravings and verses are inextricably intertwined, part of a singular vision where neither word nor image is privileged over the other. He produced them with the help of his wife, using a method called relief engraving (which he is credited for inventing) and hand-coloring each plate. His poetic and artistic work is characterized by a unique commitment to imagination as opposed to reason, and the visionary, almost terrifying, and sometimes grotesque nature of his subject matter.

Drawing on religious themes, and preferring a loose, expressive style, his book Songs of Innocence has the quality of a children’s book, with darker, adult political themes just beneath the surface. Angels are depicted alongside men, women, and children, and in the poem “London” he imagines the city as a dark, unreal realm, illustrated with an old man bent toward a child in a shadowy doorframe. The poem begins:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

Bu

By Katherine using Artweaver on a photograph she took Copyright

The outstretched open hand shows you my heart
And those  of people  near and far apart
The vulnerable, the needy, the war torn
Let’s contemplate   what we can do for these forlorn

When we’re loved we open up and show
The vulnerable  true self and undertow
When abandoned  we may die in fear
Let us look around and find those near

Trust may be for God and his strange ways
We lose it as we traverse arduous days
But then we never feel the love and joy
That enters those who trust  despite  deep flaws

Naked we are born and yet are here
Trust in the Unkown and all that’s dear.

The human trauma is our love and hate
Inevitable in long infancy and need
They interact with fortune,luck and fate

If we cannot bear imperfect states
When hatred makes us grab and gulp in greed
The human trauma is our love and hate

We try to hide our knowing till too late
Then we see our enemy can bleed
The curse of fortune,luck and  dreaded fate

The blocked out feelings come to dominate
Through unknowing, we do evil deeds
The human trauma is our love and hate

The more  we block ,the more we speculate
What  others’ wicked hearts have now achieved
Who curses   our own  fortune, brings down fate

Denied but living  like those monstrous weeds
Whose flowers  create  so many corrupt seeds
The human trauma is our love and hate
They interact with fortune,luck and fate.

A mood of stillness like a nesting dove
A lack of wind, vast silence gives repose
Symbolises blessings from above.

My trees mature now form a holy grove
The sorrow ruling me has been deposed
To give me stillness with the nesting dove

In such moods, there’s space to think, compose.
To learn the ways of energy and love
Symbolised by blessings from above.

In the crowded Mall, the shoppers shove
The special mood of peace  I fear eludes
We lose the sense of silence and the dove

In public life, we quarrel and oppose
We lose the way to  our loved treasure trove
We lose the symbols and the deep repose.

Give me your hand without its heavy glove
As we caress,   we  value human love.
A mood so stilled, oh, fluttering of the dove
No wind to destroy peace nor rain to flood

Art by Katherine

The universe is volatile and free
Nature was not made for humankind
As wild as eagles, stripe backed buzzing bee

See the storm demolish favoured trees
See the wrecks and breakage left behind
The universe is volatile ,are we?

We hear ourselves compose our  misery
The sun  is shrouded,rain darts through the wind
The eagles strong  hide in the mountain’s lea.

The particles of life ride on in glee
Regardless of our wishes or our minds
The universe is volatile and free

When we look out,our wish is what we see
But we are minute specks which  much may learn.
From eagles, cats and striped soft buzzing bees

With shutters on the  eye , we’re sad and blind
And knocked by savage grief , undignified
The universe is  merry,cruel and free
As wild as rage,  as kind as a calm sea.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201504/love-affair-between-psychology-and-poetry

Romanyshyn references the psychologist/researcher frequently in his book, The Wounded Researcher (link is external)as being “the failed poet” suggesting he or she stands at the gap between the conscious and unconscious, and bears the tension between knowing and not knowing. Romanyshyn also admits that the psychologist who keeps the soul in mind is closer in sensibility to the poet, even if he or she is not a poet. Essentially, he’s acknowledging that poetry is an art of the soul, something which has been tangentially addressed over the years. Interestingly, he also references a number of poets in his book, such as Homer, Keats, and Rilke, while identifying some of the common threads between psychologists and poets, the important one being that they tend to be individuals who are able to identify the truths of any given moment. Needless to say, they both play an invaluable societal role and without tooting my own horn, if both exist in one person, well, that’s even better.

As a transpersonal psychologist and poet, each day I see more clearly the power and influence these two professionals have on one another. Every morning I read poetry, oscillating between Rumi and more contemporary poets like Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds,

Source: http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/poets-and-writers/images(link is external)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201504/love-affair-between-psychology-and-poetry

Reference

Romanyshyn, Robert. (2007). The wounded researcher. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal Books.

The weather’s gone bipolar, so have we
Uncertainty has made us  feel  enraged
We thought we  could hand Europe back its key

Long negotiations mixed  up  do not free
We want the process finished,disengaged
The weather’s gone bipolar, so have we

No-one in the Government agrees
Old allies now start on a rampage
We thought we  could hand Europe back its key

Narcissistic, we think me,me ,me
Where have gone the wise ones and the sage?
The weather’s gone bipolar, so have we

See Al Jazeera and the BBC
Arms are being sold to  all who pay
We thought we  could hand Europe back its key

Watch the nations as their weapons  lie
Save the world for peace and bang,goodbye
The weather’s gone bipolar, so have we
We think we  hear the nuclear elegy