Telling Stories, Singing Songs, and Ways to Live Forever

In October 2012 (just a few weeks ago, at time of writing), my wife, two daughters and I attended a weekend course on Storytelling for 8-12 Year Olds at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. It was a packed programme involving story creation, storytelling, dramatic improvisation and much more.

One of the events we enjoyed took place in the grounds of Woodbrooke. We all gathered round a camp fire after dark and sang songs. One song I’d never come across before involved the popular character of Harry Potter. It went to the tune of Frère Jacques:

Harry Potter, Harry Potter

Where’s he gone? Where’s he gone?

Run of with Hermione, run of with Hermione

Poor old Ron! Poor old Ron!

With all due apologies to J K Rowling, it was great to come away from a Quaker establishment with that particular gem!

One of the leaders of this weekend storytelling course was the children’s author Sally Nicholls. After we returned home we bought a copy of her book Ways To Live Forever for our eldest daughter. A few days ago, I picked it up and read it myself.

Although Ways To Live Forever is primarily intended for children and teenagers, its direct and unashamedly open language make it a very worthwhile read for adults too.

Sally Nicholls addresses a very difficult subject in this book – a child’s terminal illness – but she overcomes adult fears and reticence by using the frank, matter-of-fact voice of the afflicted child.  The main character of the book is Sam, an 11-year-old with leukaemia, and the story is told entirely from his perspective.  Through an engaging first person narrative this book explores important questions: What are the priorities for a child who knows he doesn’t have long to live? How does he perceive the actions and conversations of the adults around him? In exploring questions like these the book draws the reader into that child’s world.

Obviously, this is not a happy, feel-good book, but that’s not to say that it’s entirely bleak and grim. There is gentle humour scattered throughout the story, and this helps lead the reader towards the (inevitable) conclusion. Essentially, in my view, this book conveys the message that tragedy of this kind cannot be swept away and ignored, but by ‘normalising’ it through the eyes of a child, it is shown as something that can be faced (just about). Nothing here is trivialised, it is simply expressed as normal for those experiencing it.

Ways To Live Forever is a fantastic book, and one whose honesty will be especially appreciated by young readers.

So, the learning experience of the storytelling course and an entertaining song about Harry Potter weren’t the only things I took away from our family weekend at Woodbrooke!

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Ways To Live Forever by Sally Nichols is published by Scholastic

ISBN 978-1-407130-50-7

Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press

ISBN 978-1-906628-21-5

A Spiritual Dimension?

In thinking about mental health – or, indeed, health in general – is there a spiritual dimension that needs to be considered?

Talk of ‘spirit’ or ‘spirituality’ is a big turn-off for many thinking people these days.  Here in the UK where secular and atheist attitudes seem to be on the rise (not that secular and atheist are necessarily the same thing), matters of spirit get cast aside as vague, unverifiable, or even non-existent.

I make no secret of the fact that I was brought up in a Christian tradition, and I remain a person of faith (though no longer affiliated to exactly the same tradition in which I was raised).  But I am also the kind of person who asks questions.  Just because someone in a position of authority (religious of otherwise) says something, doesn’t necessarily mean I will accept it.

The point is, however, that I draw on my particular background in trying to understand and make a case for the spiritual.  In doing this, what strikes me is how ordinary and natural the spiritual is.  The Hebrew word ruha and the Greek word pneuma – used in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible respectively – are both translated into English as ‘spirit’.  The words ruha and pneuma are both about ‘breath’ or ‘wind’, they are about ‘motivating force’, about the ‘engine’ that ‘drives’ us – or ‘drives’ any living thing.  You don’t have to be religious to recognise that life has – and is – a kind of energy.

So, spirituality is about the ‘stuff’ that drives us, that motives us, that keeps us moving.  But where there are problems with mental health, we can see that something about the spirit of a person is inhibited or threatened (in a less enlightened age we might have said that such a person was 'possessed' by an bad spirit!).  Indeed, in any area of human life where we see things going wrong – relationships falling apart, violent competition taking over, etc. – we can see that something about the spiritual has become disordered, that it isn’t working properly.  A person's spiritual motivation becomes diseased – i.e. dis-eased, not at ease.

In thinking about a spiritual dimension to health, we are thinking about finding ways to make the human spirit more ‘at ease’ in order to bring about helpful improvements.   This could mean different things for different people, but I would suggest that everyone might well benefit from taking the spiritual more seriously – the spirit (that ‘engine of life’) needs to be nurtured rather than ignored.

We live in a world that likes to find mechanistic solutions to mechanistic problems.  If someone has a mental health problem, very often we look for a fault in the ‘mechanism’ of the mind or brain and then try to fix it, either with drugs or with other therapies (sometimes we don't even look for the fault, we just assume it's there).  I’m generalising, of course – mental health workers would quite rightly be annoyed at my simple stereotype of their work!  But the spirit is about more than than that – it's about the whole self, the whole human race, and the whole of life all together: the spirit is life.

I would suggest, therefore – and you are free to dismiss this if you think I’m talking nonsense! – that we should all work on developing the spiritual for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of one another.  We may each do this in different ways using different forms of private meditation and/or collective sharing (or whatever you may call particular activities that have the same basic qualities).

For the sceptics – and I could so easily be one of them – I must add that I’m not trying to sell anyone a miracle.  I am merely suggesting that there is indeed a spiritual dimension and that acknowledging it (working with it, not against it) might be helpful.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press (Paperback and eBook)

ISBN 978-1-906628-21-5

For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu

A Beneficial 'Prescription' For Improving Emotional Well-Being

Mattheiu Ricard's book The Art Of Happiness (published by Atlantic) is a volume I would recommend very highly. It needs a bit of self-discipline to work through it — it isn’t a casual read — but it is well worth making the effort. 

The author is a Buddhist monk with an academic background in genetics. More recently, he has conducted research into the neurological effects of meditation. Meditation is, indeed, very much commended in this book, and the author draws on both the natural sciences and Buddhist tradition to present an approach for increasing your 'happiness skills'. It’s probably worth mentioning that the British quality press has described Mattheiw Ricard as 'the happiest man in the world' (a claim prompted by results of an MRI scan of his left pre-frontal cortex).

Some readers of a resolutely secular persuasion may find the idea of some Buddhist content off-putting, as may those of other religious traditions. In fact, the Buddhist content, though definitely present (and, in my view, of interest in itself), isn’t overly emphasised. The author does not attempt to indoctrinate the reader; essentially, he is offering a methodology — and a frequently effective one at that.

This book is not a miracle cure for unhappiness, but it is a beneficial “prescription” for improving emotional well-being.
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The Art Of Happiness: A Guide To Developing Life's Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard is published by Atlantic (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-59285-099-0

Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press (Paperback and eBook)
ISBN 978-0-85789-273-7
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu

Psychological Disturbance - Part of Our Shared Human Condition

Broadcast journalist and weather presenter Reham Khan (well-known to BBC viewers and listeners in the south of England) occasionally likes to present her friends, acquaintances and aficionados with interesting intellectual challenges. She recently posed the question, ‘Using drugs for entertainment or relaxation is a sign of a psychologically disturbed individual. Do you agree?’ She did, of course, receive a number of responses of various flavours.  Though I am not professionally or personally qualified to answer her question, I made an attempt anyway!

What interests me, though, is that Reham’s question taps into a whole range of assumptions. Her question has certainly made me aware of some of mine. Without thinking about it, I interpreted the term ‘psychologically disturbed’ in a negative light. I saw it as pejorative. To me, then, the question appeared to be asking whether recreational drug use was equated with some sort of personal moral shortcoming. Needless to say, Reham was not suggesting any such thing.

It was only after I pondered the question again later that I realised my mistake. I had interpreted the expression ‘psychologically disturbed’ in a judgemental way. In my defence, however, I would like to say that I don’t think I’m alone in making this error. There is a very long social history of seeing psychological disturbance (however it is defined) in negative terms. Sufferers of its more problematic manifestations have often been placed in institutions as ‘punishment’ for their conditions, or they have received other forms of apparently punitive attention.

What is especially disturbing today (psychologically or otherwise) is the quality of public discourse on the subject of these conditions. This has been prompted by current economic considerations. In the UK, where governmental agencies are seeking ways to reduce the cost of welfare, people with psychological disorders (and physical disorders) are finding that their claims for financial support are now being rejected. Where medical professionals used to assess the validity (or otherwise) of such claims, lower-paid administrative staff are now making the required judgements. If a claimant doesn’t use the exact words or phrases on the administrator’s check-list, his or her claim is rejected.

Rejection is a consequence of judgement. For some people who have to live with very challenging conditions, the rejection of a claim for benefits can read like moral disapproval. In such cases, not only is psychological disturbance equated with failure, it isn’t even seen as a worthy failure. And this feeds into the perception given by the popular press, and adopted by some members of the public, that the psychologically disturbed are shirkers who want to get something for nothing (even where they happen to be economically active, but need their incomes supplemented due to special needs).

I am not suggesting that this is actually happening, but given the current public discourse surrounding psychological and mental health problems, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if some people did indeed turn to recreational drugs for entertainment or relaxation – after all, it’s not as though they would be judged any more harshly.

Words are weapons, and I would suggest we need to change the words we use and the way we use them. The bigger challenge, though, is to change our attitudes. Psychological disturbance is not immoral, but it is very common. Let’s start treating it as part of our shared human condition, rather than as something to be condemned.

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On another note, it is now one year since my book Delivered Unto Lions was published in paperback. In celebration of this one-year anniversary, a new eBook edition is about to be published. More details on that to come. In the meantime, if you are a new visitor to my blog, Delivered Unto Lions can be summarised as a factually-based novel inspired by my own experience as a child psychiatric in-patient in the 1970s. It is not just (a version of) my story, however, as it represents the terrible traumatic experiences of many children and teenagers caught up in the mental healthcare system as it was at that time.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published in paperback by CheckPoint Press

ISBN 978-1-906628-21-5

eBook edition coming soon

For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu