SECTION: Process Work Therapists & Facilitators
Conor McKenna
Conor McKenna. Dip POP … Conor, a founder member of RSPOPUK is Financial Coordinator and a member of Faculty for the RSPOPUK School. He works in private practice in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders and facilitates individuals, couples and groups in both the UK and in Europe. He is deeply interested in the transpersonal and other non-local events which bring connectedness and meaning into our lives.
Tel: 01361 890329
Email: conorjmckenna@btinternet.com
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Nothing Came from Walking – A Confrontation with the Dreaming World Underlying Physical Illness
A book to live for. ISBN: 978-1-4357-1411-3. 130 pages, 6” x 9”, perfect binding, black and white interior ink.
Order Nothing Came from Walking now
The manuscript is a non-fiction account of a month-long inner and outer journey on the island of Gozo – a Maltese Island. Throughout this time I was unknowingly suffering from cancer and it was only on the last day, while in the airport, that the first signs of the illness emerged. This process is described in the second to last chapter.
The reader follows the story through frightening and transforming inner events throughout the month, culminating in the last chapter where the inner personalities, or dream figures, and the physical manifestation of cancer become one. The manuscript is written in real time, so cancer is revealed only as the writer discovers it.
The nineteen chapters alternate for the most part between strong inner conflicts and transformations and outside events while walking throughout the island, all underpinned by humour.
On his journey the writer meets an empty monk, defined only by a monk’s habit with nothing inside but awareness; he transforms body symptoms at various times; has an inner experience of being abducted by a spaceship through which he learns to objectify subjective experience, which he calls “Externalisation”; and he makes songs and develops creativity while walking. Over the period his identity gets deeply shaken by inner events and is attacked by monstrous critics. These encounters continually force him to resolve depression and gain psychological and spiritual power.
As a psychotherapist the writer avoids using theoretical jargon, but rather he writes about shamanic techniques of psychological “shape shifting”. He discovers a praying mantis within his thoughts and learns to become obscure; he tangles with death throughout and specifically, towards the end has a playful experience with it.
On the outer level, the writer walks throughout the island as one who is almost obsessed. In his wonderings he encounters people, places and events. He develops a relationship with a man who sweeps the roads; has an encounter with someone who hires bicycles; has various experiences with people at a café, and rescues a pigeon that is drowning by the sea. The real backdrop, however, is Gozo; its towns, villages, and the whole scenic area.
The manuscript is more than simply an individual’s experience of other realities; it is also a travel log as well as an instruction book helping people to resolve spiritual, mental and physical problems.
The reader will learn through the writer’s experience:
•To work in new ways with physical symptoms of various kinds
•To understand the underlying forces that create depression and how to transform both
•To follow herself, trusting that her problems have a pattern within that can bring resolution
•To work with terminal illness, either as a sufferer or a carer
•To work with pain and transform it
•To change from one identity to another (shape shifting as found in indigenous cultures) and connect to their innate power and nature
•To work with feelings of being possessed and integrate them
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A short description of contents
Confrontation
This chapter begins in Gatwick airport with the author full of excitement at the beginning of a month-long sabbatical. Soon, however, after arriving at his destination – Gozo, a Maltese Island – he falls into a horrendous depression about what he has done. He is full of guilt and regret about taking a month off from his life and suffers an unbelievable sense of emptiness inside.
Empty Habit
On the third day and still in the midst of the depression, which was akin to a “dark night of the soul”, the author has a night-time dream. In the dream a ghostly monk enters his body. The author will discover in the second to last chapter that he has cancer. This monk is the first of many signs of the “grim reaper” throughout the writing. The monk’s habit is empty except that it has awareness within it. The author uses a unique approach of shape-shifting to integrate this dream figure.
Habits and Robes
The depression has been resolved and at last the author can appreciate his break. With some humour he begins to investigate the island of Gozo; this humour is a counterpoint to fearful struggles throughout. In this chapter the inner monk experience is contrasted with assorted priests of about one thousand-strong who file past the author in the central square of the main town. This priestly line is written about in detail and the outer fixed roles are emphasised. The reader may connect the fixity of the priest’s roles to the fluidity of the empty monk, but this not spelled out.
Stopping…Stopping…Stopped…
Again the depression returns and the author is forced to reconnect to the process that rescued and transformed him – the empty monk. He writes in such a way that the reader, while reading, enters a process with her own awareness that can create a meditative experience. This chapter sees the end of the depression.
Drowning in Mid Air
This chapter introduces process oriented methods of working with body symptoms, based on accurate subjective interventions and feedback. The work shows the connection between inner subtle experience and real outer physical symptoms. Although not explained in the MSS, the author works on three levels of experience, or levels of reality – consensus reality, dreamland and sentience. There is no theory included in this MSS: I am considering writing a theoretical follow-up based on shamanism, psychology and quantum physics.
Lost Key
Here there is a counterpoint to the previous chapter. The author discovers that he has lost the key to his apartment and shows his bumbling, unworldly nature. Although all events are written as they happened, the loss of the key at this point echoes the threat to loss of identity and the acceptance of “emptiness” described in the chapter “Empty Habit”. The author is in a process that involves an organizing principle beyond his consciousness that is happening both within and without.
A Brief Rest
Here the author begins to wander the roads thoroughly enjoying himself, while feeling like a tramp. There are descriptions of parts of the island, including flora and fauna, and on his travels he visits one of the most ancient temples in the world. He describes, in an architectural way, his surroundings: an echo between the ancient builders of the temples and the builders seated next to him in the café. He then has a spiritual experience which he relates to the influence of the temples.
Fear of Change
There is a mixture of external and internal experience happening now. The author spends some time observing, from his balcony, a woman swimming. He falls into an altered state and becomes startled and frightened by a spaceship that lands next to him. He is asked to board the ship but is too frightened to do so. There is so much terror in him that the spaceship eventually leaves. Later, it returns in a night-time dream and the author is directed by a voice from the ship saying, “Board now and leave the earth”. By the end of the MSS the author will be diagnosed with prostate cancer that is beginning to spread beyond the prostate. The symbolism of the two experiences with the spaceship will be connected to his possible death. The spaceship is a symbol of another reality entering the writer’s mind.
Externalisations
Spaceships come from a place that is outside of this world; outside of human consciousness, so the author integrates in a psychological way, the process of the spaceship: he learns to externalise his thinking and experience, inhabiting the world as the “other”, which he calls externalisation.
Song Lines
The writer skips along, moving fast in any direction that attracts him; he is free and joyous in his new states of awareness. He describes scenic areas that he passes and creatively integrates subtle impressions and feelings from moment to moment. These impressions and their integration he calls “inhabiting ghosts”. The idea of Aboriginal song lines, songs coming out of the land, and actual song lines, as in popular songs, are combined here.
Little Pebbles and Big Ripples
Consciousness has moved so far beyond its own edge that the old identity became terrified and rebelled. Pandemonium ensued as the writer almost lost his mind. Voice rises up against voice in an unbearable inner chaos; this is the backlash to the freedom experienced previously. The writer rushes from his bed in the middle of the night and takes himself off into the country and climbs a mountain. There he resolves the inner war and promptly falls asleep. At this point there is a switch. The voice behind all the other voices begins to speak and takes over as a nasty narrator. This unearthly critic will appear later in different forms or expressions. When the writer wakes up the unearthly voice ceases.
Humanity
The reader gets some relief from the inner struggle as she is introduced to the hustle and bustle of market day in Victoria, the main town. There are various goings on in a café. There is an altercation with a waiter, and the writer has a discussion with an unusual new friend who is a gregarious road sweeper and a phenomenologist. The road sweeper teaches the writer about how to handle conflict.
Signals, Signs and Omens
Life continues at the café as the writer enjoys his observations. Another altercation happens between two families that is considered by the writer as a homophobic episode. Later the writer leaves the café and makes his way to the high cliffs by the sea. On his way he is accompanied by an old man who works a plot of land at the top of the cliffs. At his destination, the writer stumbles upon a fossil that is exactly like the spaceship that he encountered. This synchronicity is experienced in a way that the writer feels that the spaceship is still waiting for him.
Camera Obscura
The writer looses his expensive camera, another of several incidents showing his inefficiency and stupidity. He attacks himself and in the attack he stumbles across an internal predator; a praying mantis, who is feeding off his self-criticism. Later the same day he captures a real praying mantis on a hillside and realises that the dreaming world is manifesting both internally and in outer reality. Reading the MSS one can see that there is only one world ad that world functions both within and without.
Tweedle Deedum
A major shift happens as the usual narrator gives up the narration. The voice of the inner figure in its various manifestations speaks: the empty monk; the spaceship; the critic on the hillside; and the praying mantis. The writer wanders the island with his usual sense of self completely submerged and the awareness of emptiness is given rein. The landscape and the inner world are again experienced as one. This is possibly the most poetic chapter.
Wings of Clay
Another day, another journey; this is the final week of the month-long odyssey. The reader can settle down to a simple description of a dangerous experience were the author gets trapped in a bay with the tide coming in. He is not the only one trapped, there is a pigeon there too that has caked mud all over it and can’t fly. He and the pigeon eventually escape after much struggle.
The Osmosis Effect
The author tangles with a figure that he calls death that emerges out of him. Death is a hilarious trickster who is utterly fluid and detached. This is in contrast to the author, whose thinking is state-like and fearful. The author discovers death through entering an image of an undifferentiated cell. At this point he is tangling with his own death – an undifferentiated cell is a medical description of cancer.
The Last Journey
This chapter alternates between the penultimate day on the beach with the sun beating down, and the day of leaving; the day that the symptoms of cancer emerged. The contrast is stark; on the one hand there is a feeling of triumph; a feeling of having faced and integrated his ghosts and on the other, the panic of urinary retention at the airport: a symptom typical of prostate cancer.Postscript
Return to Heeling
The story continues at home but the style of writing changes again. In a Joycian fashion, all the voices combine through word combinations to tell of the pain and struggles of cancer; to show themselves both as the cause and the healing. The lightness and fun in the style is contrasted with the reality of pain and possible death. It is hoped that this approach to the subject will help those who suffer terminal illness, putting their situation into perspective and enabling them to live life more joyfully in the moment.
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