Things to Do While Drinking Coffee #6

Live from the High Point Cafe, West Mt. Airy, State of Mild Post-Yoga Retreat Malaise

...one thing I’ve learned is that the professional therapy world is pretty weird...like, the way people come to essentially the same gig from so many directions...medical school for psychiatrists, different kinds of degree programs for psychologists and social workers, rabbinical school, divinity school, yoga teacher training, or just working one’s way through volunteer social service work...for the writing or poetry therapy angles often English or creative writing or theatre degrees...meaning, apparently, I’m already qualified....then, if the gig we’re talking about is simply listening to people with empathy and understanding, it’s probably an area where nobody truly has expertise, though we all do, to varying degrees....

if you realize you are not there, that means you are there
Chogyam Trungpa

...reading these books about using writing to work through trauma can be difficult...since it’s hard to stay objective in thinking about these write about your most traumatic experience kinds of exercises...I’ve written about that stuff, but probably not enough...ever fearing, perhaps, that death is in the details...

I chose poetry and the metaphor not for the love of mystery or elusiveness but because that comes closer to the way we experience things deep down. Explicitness and directness cannot be applied to our psychic life. They are not subtle enough.
Anais Nin

...one book I stopped reading took this incredibly dry, anal-retentive text-book approach to using poetry as therapy...I thought, jeezus, anybody who can write a book like this has no business using poetry for anything...then, at one point, my attention was caught by a bit on working with prisoners...until I read something like the purpose of working with prisoners is to teach them to conform to society’s norms...and thought that might be your purpose, buddy...

Won’t you recognize us? We’re everything you hate...
Lou Reed

...when I tutor recovering addicts in preparation for taking the GED, I don’t hide the fact that I think that the GED, like all other standardized tests, is awful...particularly in the case of interpretive questions...basically if you think too much about the passage or the questions...or, worse yet, use your imagination...think at all about the possibilities of meaning, rather than going for the easiest, essentially rote answer...you’re going to get it wrong...so I tell them: since these tests supposedly are about seeing how smart you are, you’d think they’d reward you for thinking about things, using your imagination or creativity, but in fact they punish you for that...nonetheless, as these tests are, unfortunately, important in our society at this time, it’s necessary to learn their rules...learn them, that is, while knowing that they’re stupid, and ultimately test very little other than one’s ability to follow rules....the important thing is to know what society’s norms are...learn how to use them rather than being used by them...