Rockpool from the Shetlands

‘An Experiment in Leisure’ by Marion Milner, using the pseudonym Joanna Field, has been described as a spiritual book; it is, in the sense of exploring deeply the underlying motivations of the impulses that emerge through Milner’s memories and reflections. Every encounter with a loved person, even if they had not lasted, had given her something – a clearer picture of what it means to be alive. She remembers an adolescent companionship beginning at eleven or twelve that seemed to hold the essence of the matter:

‘… that day we went with crabbing irons to far-out rocks that the low spring tide had just uncovered, we’d never seen them before – and in the pools we found curious sea creatures, a new world of colours and shapes – unguessed-at ways of living’.

With each love had come new glimpses of experience. When she was 20, she had refused to let a new friendship develop, because she was afraid of its power – then she had a dream:

‘… I was in the bedroom of some house, there were lace curtains over the window, outside I heard music, I looked out and there were gipsies passing, going far away to practise their music on the heather, far away to the north. I ached to go with them, but could not, was impeded by heavy baggage and other things.’

The dream had a great impression on her, she decided that she was letting her fears stifle the growth of experience, and shutting herself away from the gipsy music on the heath, simply because she was not ready to face the power of it.

‘The mysterious force by which one is lived, the “not-self”, which was yet also in me, it was this force that I must learn to know, and to remember continually without fear, a force which had seemed sometimes like a beast within, sometimes like a god. … Certainly, I had found there was something – not one’s self, in the ordinary sense of the word “self” – that could be a guiding force in one’s life; but I thought it would be insolent to call this God. … It seemed then, that all these years I had apparently been trying to reach after, grasp, comprehend, this mysterious and astonishing fact of simply being alive.’

A year after writing this book Marion Milner entered psychoanalysis, eventually training as a therapist and becoming part of the Middle group at The Institute of Psychoanalysis together with Donald Winnicott and others. She continued to publish – her own experimental autobiographical work, and on psychoanalysis – she also painted and wrote on this too; preoccupied by sensory experience at different levels.

Adam Phillips recently said:

‘To me anyway, she’s like a kind of visionary, really, it was that it was as though she’d used psychoanalysis to, as it were, create her own vision. She invented it before she went into it. Then she went into it, used it, and made something of her own of it. And it’s unique. … she had a very clear sense of what she was interested in, what she was moved by. … she did believe in a sort of creative unconscious … an internal resource. … where everything came from. … for her, I think the unconscious was another word for inspiration.’

Chinese puzzle box

Writing again under the pseudonym Joanna Field, Marion Milner wrote ‘An Experiment in Leisure’, originally published in 1937, where she looked at what she called ‘the everyday problem’ of what to do with one’s spare time. For some there’s no problem – these are the people who are quite sure who they are, and who have definite clear-cut opinions about everything. For others who are less certain it’s ‘fatally easy to live parasitically upon other’s people’s happiness’ – in other words relying on someone else to decide. This she sees as a form of masochism, one often experienced by women who (and probably more so in the 1930s), curbed their own desires to suit others, leading to what she calls self-abasement – putting herself down and encouraging feelings of inferiority.

Milner decided to look initially at the memories of what she did in her spare time that kept coming to mind – memories from her whole life, both good and bad, that she couldn’t get out of her head. There is much detail from her early interest as a child in nature; throughout she followed the psychoanalytic principle that there is no such thing as irrelevance – that the mind has concerns of its own that are often not identical with conscious purposes, and noting that leisure was once defined by an analyst as the process of looking at one’s impulses and allowing them.

In her experiment, Milner finds that amongst other things, in both her memories and observations, there was a continual recurrence of mythological and religious imagery.

‘All this year it’s been growing in my mind, the possibility that the Gospel story is concerned … not with what one OUGHT to do, because someone (God, father) expects it of you, but with practical rules for creative thinking, a handbook for the process of perceiving the facts of one’s own experience – and, of course, in this sense, with “salvation”, for it is ignorance and blindness which lead to the City of Destruction. And the central truth, is it that only by a repeated giving up of every kind of purpose, plunging into the void, voluntary dying upon the cross, can the human spirit grow, and achieve those progressive fusings of isolated bits of experience which we call wisdom, truth? … For the Gospel story is obviously a Chinese puzzle-box of meanings … Real wisdom only grows under the condition of utter loss of all sense of purpose, standard, ideal, or of being pleased with yourself for being at least partly on the way to your goal …’

Whilst the ‘old forms’ of religion are seen by many as no longer adequate to express our feelings about the universe, she thinks that rejecting religion as childish is a false maturity when our feelings remain even more infantile and distorted. She finds herself in a quandary seeing that many of the anxieties that clouded her leisure, could not be cured by trying to force herself back into accepting the tenets of the church –

‘… to do this seemed impossible, it would be going against my most vital impulses, impulses which were apparently less concerned with fixed creeds, than with the overarching truth of experience. And yet also I did not think I could safely ignore the churches, for they had certainly been the guardians of some of the imagery that I had found most potent.’

The young Marion Milner

In ‘A life of One’s Own’, Joanna Field/Marion Milner writes that at the start of her experiment she didn’t really know what she was looking for, but was determined and guided by this sense of not-knowing. Yet, she knew that there was something that she needed and wanted to discover. She was concerned not to lose her way. Some years into her experiment in writing her diary, Milner began to realise there was a different way of looking at things, as well as a different way of listening. With music she tried to ‘put herself out of herself’ and get close to the music: ‘and sometimes it closed over my head, and I came away rested and feeling light-limbed.’ With looking she records this:

‘One day I was idly watching some gulls as they soared high overhead. I was not interested, for I recognised them as “just gulls”, and vaguely watched first one and then another. Then all at once something seemed to have opened. My idle boredom with the familiar became a deep-breathing peace and delight and my whole attention was gripped by the pattern and rhythm of their flight, their slow sailing which had become a quiet dance.’

What she was discovering from such experiences was the delight of not-thinking and of being aware.

Following feelings of irritation and disappointment with her holiday companion, Milner describes how rather grumpily she went alone for a walk through a forest, to where there was a cottage serving drinks and overlooking a valley. Here and unexpectedly, she finds manifold delight from her senses:

‘Those flickering leaf-shadows playing over the heap of cut grass. It is fresh scythed. The shadows are blue or green, I don’t know which, but I feel them in my bones. Down into the shadows of the gully, across it through glistening space, space that hangs suspended filling the gully, so that little sounds wander there, lose themselves and are drowned; beyond there’s a splash of sunlight leaping out against the darkness of forest, the gold in it flows richly in my eyes, flows through my brain in still pools of light. That pine, my eye is led up and down the straightness of its trunk, my muscles feel its roots spreading wide to hold it so upright against the hill. The air is full of sounds, sighs of wind in the trees, sighs which fade back into the overhanging silence. A bee passes, a golden ripple in the quiet air. A chicken at my feet fussily crunches a blade of grass …’

Milner writes that she sat motionless, draining sensation to its depths with wave after wave of delight flowing through every cell in her body.: ‘I no longer strove to be doing something, I was deeply content with what was … hearing and sight and sense of space were all fused into one whole.’ In the present moment, totally awake and aware – freed from angers and discontents and overflowing with peace.

Landscape with Woman Walking, Vincest van Gogh, 1883

The psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner wrote ‘A Life of One’s Own’, published in 1934 under the pseudonym ‘Joanna Field’. In it, Milner set out to find what kinds of experience make her happy. So, she picked out the moments of her daily life which had been particularly positive and wrote about them. It was a form of free association writing, where she gradually began to realise there are different levels to what is going on. She describes these as ‘facts’ from which she could draw a final conclusion about when and why she felt happy. An early discovery was that there was all ‘the difference in the world between knowing something intellectually and knowing it as a “lived” experience’. She began to see that much of her thinking was from what she calls the narrow focus of reason, where she was seeing life as if from blinkers, and with the centre of awareness in her head. It’s easy as she writes: ‘to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people’.

Another finding was to question the general assumption that the only way to live was a male way – what she describes as ‘objective understanding and achievement’. The realization of the masculine and feminine aspects within each person, and her acceptance of what she calls ‘a feminine aspect to the universe … just as legitimate, intellectually and biologically, as a masculine one’ where mythological and religious symbols are given validity and reverence, opened up both a greater sense of herself and of the world. From this came the breakthrough realization ‘there are two entirely opposite attitudes possible in facing the problems of one’s life. One, to try and change the external world, the other, to try and change oneself.’ The need is to hold some sort of balance rather than become one sided.

Milner saw that the very looking at an experience changed how she felt about it. She had thought she’d be happy when she was having what was generally considered ‘a good time’. However, her detective work showed her that there were moments that had a special quality of their own, and were almost independent of what was actually going on, often on trivial occasions, where she felt happy:

‘… far beyond what I had ordinarily meant by “enjoying myself” … These were moments when I had by some chance stood aside and looked at my experience, looked with a wide focus, wanting nothing and prepared for anything.’

These moments only happened when she had learned how to move beyond the blind thinking – which she saw as the enemy of unconscious wisdom, and to silence ‘a perpetual self-centred chatter which came between me and myself.’

‘By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most widely aware … my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension….by finding that in order to be more and more aware I had to be more and more still, I had not only come to see through my own eyes instead of at second hand, but I had also finally come to discover what was the way of escape from the imprisoning island of my own self-consciousness.’

Carlos Valles 

Self-acceptance – but who am I?

Carlos G. Valles was a Spanish Jesuit priest who worked in India for over 40 years so his writing often includes stories and thinking from Eastern traditions. He writes about the courage to be oneself – which is about living the fullness of the present with the acceptance and knowledge of who we are. Self-acceptance requires knowing who one is – what is this self which has my name? He heard about the spiritual practice of living in the present moment as a boy of 15, but found the reality of trying to do so impossible:

‘The idea remained … high up in my head. …The years went by, and past and future rode on my mind as wilful tyrants that scattered my efforts and tore the tissues of my spirit along all the directions of unstable thought … the idea still beckoned to me, but its practice escaped all my repeated efforts and willful resolutions. It was not easy to live in the present.’

Is there any method? Valles quotes Krishnamurti who when asked that question responded: ‘There is no method’. Rather the determination to be oneself, to live in the moment and to be present to one’s ultimate identity is, Valles thinks, a long process. He quotes the British method of cultivating a lawn: prepare the ground, remove the offending roots, sow the seed, spread manure and water regularly for six hundred years as coming closest to the attitude required for greening the self. If we learn to watch ourselves then we will find ourselves:

‘To watch my own thoughts, to uncover the roots of my conditionings, the birth of my prejudices, the growth of my fears. To watch, to discover, to unearth, to bring to light all that happens in my inner darkness. To bring to the surface of my consciousness all that goes on in my uncensored subconscious. Just to know, to unmask, to make light. No resolutions, no self-imposed exercises, no moral violence. Nature is wise and grace is ready if only we open the way to them by seeing where we stand and realising what we need.’

For Valles the long path to self-discovery and to self-acceptance culminates in being able to ask the same question that Jesus asked his disciples: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ In turn Valles suggests that in contemplation we too can ask the same question to the Divine Presence.

‘And then the miracle takes place that opens the heavens and releases the dove and a voice resounds in the depths of our heart with the whole creation as witness … “You are my beloved child.”’

John Lennon

‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’ famously said by, amongst others, John Lennon. It’s hard not to be looking ahead – the next thing to be done – our sights seem so often on the future. The idea that something new will come into our lives can sometimes be what keeps us going. So, life is a series of partial fulfilments – I did this, and soon I’ll be doing that… and somewhere is the fantasy that the truly blissful and definitive stage will be the new one. We do not recognise what we have because we expect to be given something better. We search for more because it is hard to accept ourself and where we are in the present. And Christianity with the promise of the glory that is to come, may implicitly feed into this.

Almost all other spiritual traditions urge us to stay in the present moment – as does the contemplative Christian tradition. One of the wisdom stories of Mulla Nasruddin, a folklore character from the thirteenth century whose tales are told in a wide variety of regions and especially in the Muslim world, serves as an example here:

‘When Mulla Nasruddin reached his fifth birthday his mother organised a big party for him and his friends, with games and music. At the height of it all the small boy went to where his mother was standing, in charge of all the arrangements and feeling pride in the successful party and asked her plaintively: “when this is over, can we go out and play?”’

The point of the story is that the party is fine, great fun with wonderful games, happy people and lots to enjoy, but the child does not see this, and is thinking only of when it will be over, and the real fun will begin. The commentary from Carlos Valles is that then the real fun never begins.

‘When all this is over’ – ‘the game of life, which is the supreme game of creation, is going on before our very eyes, and we are bored and annoyed because we are waiting for another game … a succession of empty expectations.’

Of course, an analytic explanation of the story might look deeper at the underlying feelings of the small boy – ambivalence towards the all-controlling mother who is so proud of what she has organised, leads the five-year-old to attack her by his plaintive questioning. Similarly, for many, our inability to stay in the present and enjoy what we are currently experiencing can be easily undermined, and attacked by anxiety and uncertainty born from the past, about what might next happen to us and what we might have to cope with. Hypervigilance and deep-set fears can make it hard to live in the moment and accept who we are and what we have in the moment.

Nonetheless the ability to accept where we are in the present is in itself a spiritual practice. Valles gives a further example of someone running for a bus as a striking image of the mental distortion we suffer when we look only to the future to the detriment of the present. The person is intent on being where they are not and failing to be where they are. The person’s whole mind, desire and body focus on ‘that fleeting point in space where they long to be.’ Neither in the street nor on the bus the person belongs to neither – the person who is nowhere is not accepting and being him or herself – missing the present reality and present experience.

Thinking for oneself

How much are our thoughts, principles, tastes and convictions borrowed from others? It usually turns out that everything we might think is ‘ours’ turns out to be commonplace inherited routine. ‘There is little of me in me’ as Carlos Valles wrote in his book ‘Courage to be Myself’ – this is about being a second-hand person. Our ideas and tastes are often culturally dependent and inherited – even our reactions are formed through careful training. Clearly no child is brought up without influence and is taught a way of life and a language; trained in moral behaviour and how to be with and relate to others. We all have to learn to be a person, have to be given certain universal foundations to function and cultural and social pointers about how to live in the world.

The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote:

‘For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, “Tell me all about it – what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?” and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment … To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigour and passion…’

To separate one’s own thoughts from those we have been conditioned to believe is one of the things that can happen in therapy and spiritual direction. ‘What are you feeling?’ ‘What do you want?’ And sometimes the answer is ‘I don’t know’, but potentially there is the space to discover.

Valles recounts an experience when he was approached by the leader of a religious group –who praised Valles – saying he was close to God but in order to become a fully enlightened person this person wanted to suggest to Valles one more thing. The man said:

“I feel moved by the Lord to propose it to you … all you have to do is to recite after me the sacred formula I will pronounce and bow at the name of the guru, and wear always round your neck this locket with his picture … this step I firmly believe is God’s will to you.”

Valles whilst respecting the man’s sincerity rejected the offer, and the man was disappointed. Valles felt suppressed anger:

‘If this is all religion has to offer, I thought, no wonder we are in crisis, and indifference grows all around us. Repeat the words and tie carefully the thread. That is all you need. …Bow your head. Surrender your mind. Someone has done all the thinking for you, and all you need now is to repeat what you are told. If that is enlightenment, there’s not much light in it, and, if that is religion, it is a very sorry religion.’

It’s our own experiences that can help shape our thinking …

Searching for self-acceptance and finding one’s own truth can be both wearying and exhilarating. For Vera von der Heydt there is always a centre within us to be found – but the route to it is individual, and for her the way was both through religion and analysis. What matters most she feels is the search, a search for a glimpse of where ‘the treasure’ is and reaching it or not is uncertain.

Both analysis and religion involve confession – in both the process of unfolding and developing one’s sense of who one is and then self-acceptance. The journey is a bit like a spiral. Sometimes there’s a sense of having found something – a breakthrough – only to find that it is lost again.

‘This is an experience which one gets to know quite well, but one plods on because one realises that the components of the psyche have to be analysed and scrutinised. The light of understanding has to be brought into the darkness of disorder, and then eventually a synthesis, in the shape of a different pattern, can emerge into consciousness.’

This is the process of inner transformation – as Jung said this is the greatest service that we can perform in our life. A process that will eventually show that we no longer need to split off parts of oneself, and in pretending they don’t exist because of horror and shame, end up projecting them onto others or groups of other people. In analysis we can look back and ask ‘why did this happen’. The inner searching helps us withdraw the projections and learn to differentiate between ourselves and others –this she sees is the heart of self-acceptance – being more secure in the value of our own being. Then it’s increasingly possible to have reactions and emotions instead of being possessed by them.

It’s then that we can ask a more religious question – which is ‘what did this happen for?’ a question which von der Heydt believes points not to the past but rather opens up the present, the now, and opens up the realm of purpose and meaning. This is the question which we should ask all through our lives, as the journey towards authenticity and self-acceptance is never completed and individuation never ends, though analysis as a treatment does.

Any descent to the underworld – here she means into the unconscious as in analysis is dangerous because of the power of the past to seduce us into staying with it – in the same way that visions about the future as in ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ are enticing. Both are parts of life and are within each person and a fundamental pair of opposites which we have to come to terms with:

‘I have become very conscious of past joy and pain, and of fear and hope for the future in myself. I know that every day at every moment of the day these two have to be united in me, into the now of my life, into my present which is above time.’

Vera von der Heydt began to read Carl Jung’s work, beginning with ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ which she thought the most important book that had ever come her way. Although meeting Jung at a conference, and sitting next to him at dinner one night, she felt unable to ask him any questions as she felt his ideas were beyond her comprehension. Analysis was too expensive and also, she knew no one who might see her. When the Second World War began Von der Heydt was interviewed by the police about why she was in the UK, but could only answer on the strength of her parent’s connections and relations of her mother. This she felt left her feeling invalidated, and the choice of the country also felt of less value, and at this point of feeling she was unacceptable she sought therapy. After two analysis and time spent in Zurich, more meetings with Jung where she did feel able to speak and could describe her work in a clinic, Von der Heydt became a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology. Jung’s psychology gave her a sense of self-acceptance:

‘It was Jung’s approach to the individual which meant so much to me. He did not think in terms of how somebody should be, but who the person was. He attempted to understand the individual by studying the ways in which the person had expressed their fears and longings in the past. … Jung symbolically accepted … dark, hidden spirituality … it was this attitude that gave me a sense of validity and of wholeness’.

So, what is self-acceptance? Von der Heydt sees it as a universal issue. We all have difficulties from the past with our parents; we all have difficulties in relationships and with partners; we are all afraid and lonely; we’re all afraid of being angry, and, we are all looking for meaning in our lives, hoping to relate to something which is more than ourselves. Above all we all want to be loved and accepted and forgiven, and to be helped to acknowledge and confess our weakness and shame. We are individual and have to solve our problems in individual ways, but our bodies and our psyches are so alike. Relating to each other sometimes in harmony, sometimes following in rhythm with another and sometimes being followed, our inner work is to bring into consciousness these dynamics and so understand ourself and the other person.

Through Jung and his ideas Von der Heydt writes that: ‘I learnt to look at myself without comparing what I was with something or someone else, without condemning myself, but as far as possible taking responsibility for my flaws.’ She describes how people often questioned how she could be a Jungian analyst and a member of the Roman Catholic church. Whilst from the purely intellectual point of view there can be no answer to that question, she says the answer is simple – as not a thinking type, she apprehends and comprehends ‘from a centre other than mind’.

‘I would say that Jung’s approach and attitude … has enriched my faith and kept any doubts I may have healthily in consciousness. Conversely my faith has illuminated many of Jung’s ideas and helped me to understand what he was trying to do and what he hoped to achieve on his way to experience and greater awareness.’

Vera von der Heydt

One of the problems of life is how to get to know oneself, and how to relate to and accept who and what one really is. This is the courage to be authentic, living with the knowledge of both the good and bad present in each of us. Only then is it possible to live in the present moment.

I like the way that Vera von der Heydt – an early follower of Carl Jung, and a pioneer in the study of the relationship between psychology and religion, expresses how important it is to recognise the ‘conditionings and prejudices which keep one in a state of unconsciousness’. She understands that we can’t do this on our own and need help – it might come from a book, or a friend, therapist, or a random stranger, and ‘chance may well cast a glimmer of light on it’:

‘We need another human being to encourage us to continue our searchings when we are in the wilderness. …Sometimes, however, one is too identified with and unconscious of the nature of one’s problem to be able to listen nor to see the key which could open the door to one’s prison.’

Von der Heydt was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a mother who was half German and half Irish; her parents had high expectations of achievement and success. As a child she felt unable to identify with any other member of her family, aware of ‘the conflicting strains within myself … and my racial and spiritual “otherness”’. Seen as delicate in her early childhood, and considered stupid but pretty, she was sent off at the age of 12 to a school where she was told it was vital to learn to think. She liked the school very much, and describes a significant experience when she asked to see the headmaster to find out whether he believed in the immortality of the soul. He advised her to read books, and she began to read the mystics, Jewish, Christian and Indian, because of this, ‘I became more and more aware of another dimension’.

After an unsuccessful early marriage led to divorce, von der Heydt felt that she continued to live in a state of unconsciousness, until gradually waking up to a realisation that what she had been looking for within herself was an inner power ‘pushing me out of a collective, conditional environment into shaping my own life.’ With Hitler’s rise to power, she emigrated to Britain to live in London and work as a secretary:

‘I had ample time to think about things, about the dreadful outer events and the reaction of various countries and various individuals to the Fascist mass movement and to the violence that was unleashed and deliberately fostered. I began to look at myself, at my own violence and wish to retaliate, my hope of avenging myself on those who had killed – murdered – people I loved.’

 Full of inner turmoil, she spent time sitting in churches. In the Brompton Oratory she sat speaking to the figure of Jesus and in her mind heard him speak to her. She then knew she had to become Catholic – ‘Actually I did not “become” a Catholic, for I realised that I had been one all my life’. Attacked by a number of people who couldn’t understand this decision given the dogma and the crimes of the church over the centuries; von der Heydt only knew that she had stumbled across her truth. Later, framing it in Jungian terminology, she understood that an archetype had been activated and a symbol had come to life within her.