When we are suffering with thoughts, feelings, body sensations, experiences, or memories, it can sometimes be useful to chart the journey of others who have struggled in similar ways.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who I came to quite late in my reading life, never having studied philosophy as a subject, experiencing it for the most part a somewhat intimidating domain, struggled with health issues, both physical and mental, for much of the time he was on this planet.

If he were alive today, I suspect he might have been diagnosed with having fibromyalgia, or another issue that highly sensitive folk often struggle with.

What I find inspiring about his life is that he seems to have landed on a way, at least for a while, of finding value, meaning, and joy at the same time as being ill on a constant basis.

I think this short chapter from the novelist Stefan Zweig’s recent book on Nietzsche gets to the heart of a paradox that often arises in psychotherapy, but also in our lives in general: how to “love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it,” as the poet Ellen Bass laments, “and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands”?

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Full text of this episode can be found here.

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So I finally got around to reading The Power of Now.

I had studiously avoided the text since it’s publication in 1999. I think because a part of me had made certain assumptions about this book.

Let’s call that part of my mind The Intellectual Snob. The Intellectual Snob had assumed that Eck’s bestseller was nothing but minestrone soup. How could it be a “spiritual classic” in such a short time? Who cared if Oprah Herself was singing its praises – no, this phenomenon was nothing but excessively reheated minestrone soup. End of.

And that’s not good soup by anyone’s standards, that’s soup made up of spiritual bits and bobs, cherry-picked from Eastern and Western traditions, strung together with a snappy, bumper-sticker slogan and delivered in my audiobook format through Mr T’s faintly creepy vocalizations.

THE POWER OF NOW?

Yadda yadda, yawn.

(Forgive the tone of my Intellectual Snob, but that’s how they sound.)

CONTINUE READING: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/therapy/the-power-of-now-therapy/

For many, many years now, I have signed off all my emails to the people I care about with the word “warmly”.

I can’t remember where I picked this up from. It was not my own invention. But at some point, I must have received an email from someone with a “warmly” preceding their name, and felt with great pleasure some of genuine warmth baked into the salutation. Being a human monkey, in true monkey-see, monkey-do spirit, I wanted to pass these warm vibes on! And hopefully I have.

For me, “warmly”, is akin to saying “with love”. And why would we not end all our communications in that way, including our professional ones? I don’t know. But I do know that warmly has worked well for me, rather than the more common (and to my ears, less warm and loving) sign-offs such as “cheers” or “best” or “regards”, as well as the many different forms of “yours” (sincerely, faithfully, truly etc.).

The problems with off-the-peg sign-offs though, including “warmly”, is that through usage they somehow lose their presence and emotional charge, becoming a kind of empty placeholder, a nothing.

So just for fun, I thought I might come up with a few new sign-offs, starting with this one: SPLGE-R.

Continue reading: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/my-splge-r-sign-off-explained/

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I admire a very simple swing. I then swing on the very simple swing and get more than I bargained for.