Recently I incarcerated a friend.
    For the purpose of this blog I’ll call him Laird. Laird has always been able to calm me when I’ve been stressed. Additionally, he’s taken me to some wild and beautiful places. 
    Why would I ever do such a thing?
    Laird is not a people friend but a musical one, a sequence of riffs with a harmonic and rhythmic structure. Laird’s incarceration was not behind bars but between bar lines. My incarceration involved stretching him out on the musical staff as a line of black dots.
    Laird has enjoyed freedom of movement for years, ever deepening his lyricism and quirkiness. When I play him, he has a decidedly Celtic character, always eliciting feelings of wistful contentment. The folk at the coffeeshop really like him.
    In incarcerating Laird to lay on the lines and spaces of a musical score I can pass him forward to be played by others. Thanks to his incarceration he’s going to be played in an arrangement for handbells, a solo ringer playing his riffs while I provide the accompanying harmony on the digital piano.
    But it all has been incredibly hard, this incarceration. And I know to call it that is totally irrational, but it’s how I felt doing it. 
    Upon reflection, I believe it was the right thing to do. I also think it’ll be good for Laird. 

I’m doing something else different in this month’s blog, riding it piggyback on a previous one. I’ve appended below my blog from January entitled “On being right, wrongly.” If you’re still intrigued by the ideas for this month, or you just need to have another cup of coffee and something to read while you enjoy it, it’ll be there for you. 
    
So, getting back to Laird. 
    I discovered something in creating Laird’s musical score with the help of a musician skilled in arranging for the handbells. When I’m composing music I don’t always put the same number of beats in each measure. Sometimes there will be four, sometimes three, sometimes five. After I got Laird’s sequence of notes down, the arranger placed it into proper musical notation. To match my rhythm in playing Laird he had to put in bars of 3/4 and 5/4 timing as well as the 4/4. 
    My arranger friend assures me that some other musical compositions (the formal, serious kind of music) have different time signatures within the composition. However, a part of me wishes Laird had naturally laid himself out in an orderly pattern with a consistent beat throughout. So we’re working on it. In asking other musicians to play Laird it would only seem right and proper that his riffs would read in a more consistent fashion like that.
    But another part of me is delighted Laird moves to his own rhythmic structure when he’s just with me. That feels good too. Which brings me back to the theme of the earlier blog (the one you are going to read next). There’s a significant difference between right and good.
    The difference comes down to context. If our context is collective, rightness of behaviour serves the benefit of all. As a society, we benefit from everyone stopping at stoplights. Amateur musicians, like our handbell ensemble, will more easily handle a musical score with the same number of beats to a bar. However, if our context is interpersonal goodness is important. Goodness allows us adapt to the intrinsic and unique spirit of the other. That’s what happens with my Laird when I play him solo. 
    We need to strive to do the right thing in society but need to strive to do good things in relationships. 
    
My experience as a psychologist also had to balance right and good. I had to abide by the ethical codes and culture of my profession, both were very focused on whether or not individual practitioners were doing the right thing. But the therapy room was a place of conversation with one other person, a dance of interlacing subjectivities. I had to be good there. While I invariantly engaged some rightnesses as defined by my profession (e.g. respecting personal boundaries, focusing only on the wellbeing of the client) some other things, things typically labeled as the right thing to do, had to give way to make room for goodness. Right labelling (diagnosis) was less important than truly understanding the subjective distress of the client. A therapy protocol designated as “best practice”, and thus the right approach, may be ineffective or harmful given the personality and context of the individual. 
    Let’s think of rightness and goodness as inhabiting two different realms. Rightness engages linear causality: we do this to that to get a result. If it works, then it was the right thing to do. On the other hand, goodness works within complex systems such that each good input filters into the output of a network of dynamic, interacting variables. 
    Within the complexity of human relationships acts of goodness beget more goodness, contributing to and altering the emergent properties of the complex system. Emergent properties of a complex human system would include wellness, emotional richness and balance, and responsible behaviour. Acts of goodness may take on many forms including kindness and graciousness, but also truthfulness, good personal boundaries and refusal to take part in toxic or harmful interactions. 
        
So getting back to my friend, Laird. One of the things I can be good about is letting Laird be different when he’s being played by others. In our culture it is expected that music is learned from a written score, practiced and performed. So in the context of how music is generally heard, what I did is the right thing to do.
    In the long run, incarcerating Laird has provided him with yet a new freedom, to enter new imaginations through handbells rather than just my piano. Perhaps he needn’t be bound by the wistful contentment he has always been with me. And that’d be a good thing too.
    
Now onto the next column, previously posted in January 2026.

About being right, wrongly
​
So it happened again. You’d think I’d learn, eh?
    A couple of months ago I blogged about a coffeeshop listener who wanted me to play the song I’d played a year before with fairies in it. A few weeks ago someone wanted the song with the bubbles. Just to be clear, fairies and bubblies had never been a inspiration for any song I’d composed. After trying out different ones with my listeners I was able to locate the songs inspiring those unique subjective experiences. Now I feel their fairy-ishness or ebullience when I play them. Those songs have come to mean something different for me based on the experience of them by others.
    Oh, and then there was the song I’d always associated with the wind swept heather of Scotland. It took a listener into the tropical forest of Jamaica. 
    What am I to make of this? I used to wish people would just get it right, recognize what I was describing when I composed a song. But not any longer; now I think its kind of fun when they don’t. I’m delighted when the mood and impetus within a song transports to different places than I could have imagined on my own. My creative endeavours are turning the listener’s direction of focus inward, to get them more in touch with what has meaning for them.
    Let’s call this in-sight.
    Let me reflect on just how loaded that word happens to be.


Early on in my career as a psychologist I was trained on something called a mental status examination. I was required to conduct one of these on every client. As well as querying usual mental health symptoms (things like sleeping, eating, activity level, flow of thought, distressing emotions) it had me check for client insight. In that setting the term “insight” had a very specific meaning. The client was insightful if they agreed with what the psychiatrist had diagnosed them to be and would comply with treatment as their only hope in getting well.
    Later in my career I discovered there was an entirely different use of the word insight, one quite the opposite of agreeing with the psychiatrist. Insight emerged within clients through thoughtful evaluation of their personal motivations, values and habitual patterns of behaviour and relationship. The insight orientation in psychotherapy involved respectful questioning and gentle feedback. Through that process, the client discovered something uniquely their own, something they could act on it responsibly triggering personal growth. 
    You can see the contrast.
    However, the culture and regulation of my former profession however was not inclined toward the latter as I was. It was about doing things right. We were to make the right diagnosis and then apply the right treatment regime. When it came to ethics, the right thing was rote following of codes, standards, guidelines and best practices. 
    Over the course of my career I began to recognize the limitations and harm that such rightness can involve. Enacting externally defined rightness shuts down one’s own critical thought, negates creative solutions to unique circumstances, and disqualifies nuance. 
    The alternative? Rather than striving to be the arbiter of the right for my clients, as a psychologist I encouraged them to find what was good within them, essentially learning to grow their own sanity and functionality.
    Often clients would ask what was the right decision in a particular situation. My typical response was that rather than a right decision the client needed to make the first of a series of good decisions. Each good decision would move them closer to what would eventually resolve the problem. A good decision was in keeping with their values, opened up options and, provided them with more resources to address the larger issues they faced. 
    Working this way I needed to get to know the uniqueness of the client, not reduce them to a single dimension of disorder or deficit. It helped to know the pace of life change for the client and what gave them a sense of meaning and satisfaction. Sure I could suggest options and ideas but I did so not to solve the problem but open up new possibilities. Typically the client came up with more suitable directions than I could have, their perspective and possibilities triggered by things I’d suggested. 
    
I have debated what title I would put on this blog. I really wanted to call it “Standing up to the tyranny of the right”. Of course, that would’ve immediately been considered a political statement (and for those who know me, there would be knowing nod of the head).
    There are times when holding to what is correct is apt and helpful. Our national neighbour to the south is providing us with a cautionary tale about about firing scientists and eliminating regulation for health and safety. We’ll see how that turns out.
    As a psychologist I often found myself occupying two worlds. Not ones defined by right and left but two worlds were defined by distance, two meters distance. 
    Let’s consider the inner one. Within the sphere of about two meters around me I could influence for change. Inside that sphere I can recognize nuance, enact sensitivity, and celebrate emergent awareness. It’s the zone of conversation. Psychotherapy was always just a conversation for me with my clients, but a vulnerable and emotionally intimate one. Within that sphere it’s counterproductive and disrespectful to simply be right about things. Therein, it is especially important to be guided by values of respect for the dignity and self-determination of others, clear thought, and compassion. 
    Then there is the other sphere, the one two meters out. In interfacing with others out there, I want to make correct choices and have others do so as well, you know about things like driving on the same side of the road as other drivers going my direction and stopping at stoplights.
    What I treasure about playing original jazz in the coffeeshop is my listener and I are firmly within that in-close sphere of connection, a place where their experience of my music can enrich my own. Neat!

In my province there’s a political movement of folks wanting to separate from Canada. One of the reasons given for this is that Alberta has a distinct culture, different from the rest of the country. This has prompted me to think more about culture. We tend to get embedded in our home culture, never giving it a second thought. Our cultural perspective simply seems to be what is normal and proper. 
    Recently, I spent a few weeks in Newfoundland and experienced the culture there. What a shock it was in comparison to Alberta. I consistently found the Newfoundlanders to be warm, spirited, kind, and content. Their eyes are lively and their smiles at the ready. They are oh-so-proud of their province and history. 
    Newfoundland is not a wealthy province, especially out in the remote areas. Not only that, but the weather there can be rather awful as the damp, bitter cold comes down from the Arctic on the coastal current (bringing icebergs!). And talk about adversity… the main employment for the oceanside villages completely collapsed 25 years ago with the moratorium on the cod fishery. It’s just trying to get going again but will never be the same. So you’d think the people there would be anything other than warm, spirited, kind and content. But this a people who see hard times as about pitching in to help each other rather than about blaming and complaining.
    In contrast, I expect the rest of Canada is getting the impression that the Alberta culture is outraged, resentful, bitter, and entitled. Not Albertans are that way of course, in fact it seems only about a quarter of the population is. However that quarter is loud (vocally and with truck horns). As angry as they are, the rest of us are equally anxious these days. 
    Both angry and anxious are the opposite of how we experienced the people of Newfoundland. There simply seems to entirely different cultures in the two provinces.
    Culture defines which emotions are communally felt. In Newfoundland in addition to their bright and friendly spirits there are feelings of melancholy and a sense of tragedy. There’s sadness with many losses, but never did I experience people being resentful or embittered about it. They remember it all, that’s important to do. Much of the remembering comes in their songs with their storytelling lyrics. Singing those songs with their guitars and accordions brings a sense of community as they remember together. They don’t feel entitled to a better life, just watch out for others worse off than themselves to be able to help. In Alberta the separatist culture is focuses on being victims and blaming. 
    Ah, what a contrast between grief and grievance!
    Culture can limit us, take away the breadth and depth of who we can be. It can obscure our values. Culture defines for us what things mean. It limits meaning by disqualifying any suggestion that things could be understood differently.
    
I began to notice culture on a micro level when I was working as a psychologist. In my professional role I visited schools and found that different schools had different micro cultures, ones immediately apparent walking into the teachers’ room. In one school the teachers’ room had brownies on the table to share, one teacher was helping another with her marking. A different school just had teachers sitting silent and exhausted with grim looks on their faces. 
    I worked in human service agencies. In some of them there was a spirit of superiority, self-protection and resentment. Others were welcoming, with staff engaging each other through laughter, celebration and story telling.
    Over my four decades as a psychologist I watched the culture of my profession drift. The profession became increasingly legalistic. Fear replaced passion for engaging the human condition and helping those suffering. We feared being caught if we weren’t doing things in the only approved way or ticking the boxes properly. 
    The conformist culture of the profession worked against our ability as professionals to engage in critical thinking. I entered the profession having studied the sciences at university. I was keen to observe, generate hypotheses, test them out, hone my understanding and go back through it all again to deepen my perspective on what was in front of me. However, professional psychology didn’t want us to be scientists at all but technicians who let someone else do our science for us. As a result our critical thinking skills atrophied to replaced by dutifully following the protocols of best practice. Unfortunately, what the textbooks and professional development conferences declared to be best practice could never be better than tailoring our interactions to the specific characteristics of the client and their circumstances. 

So what do we do when we realize the culture in which we are embedded has limited us, has led us away from our personal values, has effected negatively the emotions we feel? I will hazard some suggestions.
    First, check in with what your personal values are, the priorities and perspectives you’ve had throughout your life. It might be things your grandmother taught you or you learned from a school teacher who took an interest in you, or decisions you made in your adolescence about who you were going to be as an adult.
    Secondly, talk to people from outside your micro-culture who see you as being as a person separate from your context. Is your toxic workplace, social media feed, religious group, or friendship circle pushing you to be a different self?
    Thirdly, think for yourself using reliable inputs. Influencers don’t have your best interests at heart; they’re working for power and profit and you are their mark. Get off social media as much as you can because it is driven by algorithms for achieving its capitalistic objectives. Limit yourself to professional journalists for politics and global reporting. Read widely, particularly things not recommended by people in your own cultural group. 
    Finally, work to create a culture around you that fits your own integrity and values. You may not be well liked for it. However, in the long run, you’ll be happier within yourself.

Let’s start on the piano bench at the coffee shop. 
    Watching a family in the comfortable chairs in front of the piano, my attention is taken by a very careful seven-year old boy. He’s eating his dish of chocolate ice cream, deliberately scooping off the sprinkles and Smarties. Eventually, he hands the dish over to his father to finish. Then he sits quietly. When I ask his parents if he’d like to come up to the piano with me they let me know he’s taking piano lessons. With very quiet confidence he comes. We tune match together on the keyboard and then he says he’d like to play Hot Cross Buns. I google it to get the tune in my head to get him started. He plays very well. Another coffee shop customer gets out her phone to video our connection there on the piano bench.
    This blog is about a very human sort of connection I'm calling companioning. For a scant few minutes that seven-year old boy and I were musical companions. It felt deeply enriching for me. 
    It’s easy to think of relationships in terms of family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. We cherish our long-term committed relationships supporting each other through the vagaries of life (my spouse and I will soon celebrate our 51st Anniversary). But this blog is about that different sort of relationship, companioning.

In addition to my time on the piano bench, I’m delighted to have a reading buddy.
    We decide together on the books we’re going to read and then read in parallel with each other. Text messaging and video calls include conversations about the books. He previews my reviews before I publish them. My reading buddy and I have different educational and professional backgrounds. This deepens our understanding of what we’re reading. In selecting books, we choose according to each other’s interest. 
    Having a reading buddy is another example of companioning. While we have a friendship in addition to our reading together, the discipline and deliberation in the companion reading has enriched both of us. It provides a structure that keeps our connection strong and eager for what we might read ourselves into next. 

A few years ago I watched a young person drop off her resume at the coffee shop where I was playing. As we got to know each other I found out she was studying psychology at the local university and hoped to make a career in it. Before long she was sharing what she was excited about learning in class and I was sharing what it was like to work as a psychologist.
    For the last three years we’ve companioned together. A cherished friendship has developed but largely the focus has been on her journey through academic psychology and the development of her critical thinking skills. Walking along beside her I got a sense of how the science of my field has developed and she has gotten a sense of what it’s like to apply the things she’s learning to the practical work of a psychologist. 
    Throughout this companioning her studies have been our touchstone, much like the plunking away on the keyboard with the seven year-old and the reading together with my buddy. 

Yes, companioning is a word, the verb form of the noun companion. I checked a few dictionaries but the definitions there are not as specific as the way I’m using the word here. I propose that companioning involves a deliberate coming alongside another person, typically focused on sharing a particular task or part of life’s journey. For it to be effective it needs to be founded on respect for the autonomy of each other, not trying to have power over or exploit the good will of the other person. It is open-ended but deliberately focused. 

For four decades I provided psychotherapy to those suffering with overwhelming negative emotions and seemingly unsolvable life situations. To do so, my profession equipped me with disciplines of critical thought, protocols of assessment and intervention, and the ethics of proper conduct. Professional psychology prides itself on its objectivity, considering only an understanding of the human condition that could be demonstrated through research that generates statistics for numerical analysis. Our thinking was always linear. In the clinical office we were to turn our client’s subjective experiences into objectifiable symptoms and diagnosis, and then apply research-proven interventions. The field dogmatically asserted that these were the things, the only things, that could yield valid knowledge and help in the professional practice.
    And yet I believe the most powerful element of the psychotherapy room was our companioning, the coming alongside of someone facing the tasks of life with the intention of promoting their autonomy and wellbeing. While I paid attention to the way my profession required me to work, I didn’t do just that. Another element was vital to help my clients move forward, the intentional and careful companioning with them in the midst of their struggle. 
    I suspect that long before Freud and Skinner set us thinking about personality and behaviour, companioning existed. Gurus, mentors, elders came alongside of people who would benefit from personal support. A farmer, fisher, or logger would see another struggling with a task and come alongside to help. They would do so wisely so that the struggling one would not feel diminished or inadequate for needing help, just that they faced a task that happened to be too much for them at the time. 
    One poignant experience of companioning occurred for me in the veterinarian’s office where I sat with my elderly and ill dog as she was euthanized. Of course, I was a companion to her in those last moments of her life, but a wise and sensitive veterinarian was a companion to me, sitting with me through the procedure, honouring the wonderful dog that Marly had been and the emotions I would pass through. 
    I believe the capacity for companioning is deeply wired into the DNA of what it means to be human. There are many personal rewards in companioning with another, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it because we believe in the worth of the other and the value of their task or time of life.

I first met Ken and Marlys during early mornings while my wife and I were on holidays with friends. I always got up earlier than the others. My early rising gave me a great chance to get to know this other interesting couple. Then, I brought Ken and Marlys to the breakfast table so my traveling companions could meet them too. Ken and Marlys were facing a predicament in their lives, one that clashed spectacularly with their propensities. 
    More recently I spent time with Ken and Marlys on the stage of our local theatre. They were dressed in Edwardian garb and I was costumed as a parrot.
    
This is a story about story. It’s about how stories, and perhaps about how all things creative, move through a process of emerging, adapting, consolidating and moving on. 
    Ken and Marlys are fictional, perhaps you already gathered that. They were written into a short story those early mornings while I was on holiday. There’s a lot of humour in their story. However, their story is much more than that. It’s an illustration of what I’ve seen and celebrated in my professional career as a psychologist, something about what it means to be human. 
    Let’s try something different in this month’s blog. If you have an extra fifteen minutes you can jump to the story, Sailor, on another page of this website. At the end of that page is the link to jump back here. You would be able to understand the rest of the blog without first reading the story, but reading the story will make this much more fun for you.  Here’s the link: Sailor
    
So, this is how Ken, Marlys and I (as a parrot) got on stage.
    Three weeks before an Arts Gala themed on the Netflix series, Bridgerton, a theatre guy read several of my short stories. He was taken with the one entitled Sailor and decided it would make a great one-act play for the Gala. I was game.
    During the rehearsals the actor portraying the part of Marlys got it: the story was about the healing power of compassion. I’d never phrased it so concisely as she did. Of course, compassion’s transformational power has been a long held belief of mine. It motivated my entire career as a psychologist. It’s not surprising it emerged in my story about Ken and Marlys.
    This blog could very well be about that belief. But it isn’t.
    It’s about the creative process. 

The creative process is an emergent one. 
    The stage play Sailor came together in two short weeks. The creativity I had in writing the short story jumped into an entirely new form, first as it was re-written as a stage play and then further interpreted through the creative power of actors in a small improv group. There were challenges. We had a very short time line to prepare it for the stage. We needed it to be acceptable for a general audience including children. The story itself needed to be abridged to fit into a ten minute slot in the night’s schedule. 
    It all turned out out quite differently than I’d imagined it in its initial writing. One round of creativity gave way to another round of creativity and then to another, all preserving the story’s humour and theme. 
    What started as a solitary venture became a co-creative process with the actors. 
    And that’s the focus of this blog. 

As I look back on my professional career, as I’m so apt to do in this blog, I realize psychotherapy is also essentially a creative act, or actually, a co-creative one. 
    A person entering psychotherapy is typically stuck, stuck within persistent negative emotions, stressful circumstances and hurtful or ineffective relationships. It’s that stuff about propensity and predicament all over again. To get out of that stuck, new ways of thinking and acting are needed. 
    The creative work of the therapist notices the uniqueness of the client and their situation, looks for openings of receptivity and resiliency to build on, finds ways the client can be motivated to work toward change. The therapist’s flexible and responsive approach fosters creativity in the client, helps them explore new ways of thinking and engage new ways with the world around them.
     That creative process interlaced many elements. I could bring the knowledge that the science of psychology has developed to seed ideas and possibilities for the client. I could bring in the wisdom of healing and recovery garnered from the creative work of other clients. My life work fostered an appreciation the complexity of the human condition which helped me respond with compassion, patience, hope and grace for the client’s struggles. The ethics of my profession would safeguard my clients from harm.
    It was a creative process, unique to each client. 
        
So getting back to the parrot…
    The predicament that Ken and Marlys encountered was that Sailor, a parrot they’d adopted through a rescue society, swore prodigiously. Ken and Marlys had their own propensities, too. They were in their senior years and had strong religious beliefs which forbade the very thing the parrot was very good at. 
    (If you haven’t already flipped over to read the story, you probably want to do so now. Here’s the link again: Sailor)
    The challenge the theatre group had was to put on a play with swearing as a central element for a general audience, without any swearing coming from the stage. If you’re interested in how that was accomplished send me an email and I will write back to tell you (wilton@twiltondale.ca). Truly, what the actors did was ingenious. 
    While a stuffed parrot in a bird cage or a parrot hand-puppet could have worked, neither would’ve been optimal to portray the transformational power of compassion: that required an interpersonal connection. So, I got to play the part of Sailor. I don’t want to give too much away but will mention that the bird eventually replaced the swears with a chuckle that would help Marlys heal from a deep sadness she felt. 
    And that’s what creativity and compassion can do. 

I’ve experienced a sense of awe while walking in old growth forests and entering Gothic Cathedrals. That feeling is such a wonderful thing: otherworldly, spiritual, emotionally up-lifting.    
    In sharp contrast, my media diet of late has revealed something entirely different about the human capacity to experience awe. My listening has included a true crime documentary, a Canadian podcast about charismatic Christianity and news reports from the United States. Each demonstrated that ecstatic spiritual experience can also lead into pure treachery and trauma.
    The crime documentary is called Twisted Yoga. It documents a European network of Yoga studios/retreats which sexually exploit young women. The studios seduce the women with what appears to be deeply spiritual Yoga, one leading to transcendent spiritual experience through teaching and disciplined practice. Attractive women are approached to go further, travel to a place where they live together. They are deepened into an increasingly sensual yoga and taught the theoretical framework which underlies the specific practices. The process grooms and propels these women along a path toward tantric (sexual) initiation provided by the cult’s guru. The sexual satisfaction, power and control by the guru seems to have been the purpose all along. Some of these women are then passed on into a money-making sex industry.
    This documentary is deeply disturbing. You may not want to watch it.
    Over the last few months I’ve been listening to a podcast called Heaven Bent, which I do highly recommend. It documents abuse and fraud within the charismatic movement of evangelical Christian religion. The spiritual practices of this movement involve ecstatic worship including nonsensical babbling and loss of physical control, experiences which are supposedly spiritual gifts from God to true believers. The movement attracts young people, some of whom end up profoundly damaged, including being sexually abused by some of the powerful leaders. 
    News reports early in the United States military excursion into Iran contextualized the actions of the United States as a step toward bringing on Armageddon, the fulfillment of prophecy about the end of the world popular in certain pockets the Christian religion. As a child and adolescent my religious affiliation strongly focused on this doctrine of the End Times with its drama of world disruptive events. Its anticipation was filled with visions of the awe-invoking, transcendent events. Now those beliefs are being used to justify killing people and crippling another country. According to these reports, the USA Chain of Command motivated the US troops to their deadly task by perpetuating their leaders’ religious beliefs, most likely with great fervour of meaning and importance. The Secretary of War in the United States, Pete Hegseth, prays and quotes Biblical Scriptures in his news conferences as he visibly appears to relish the destruction he is inflicting. 
    
How can intense spiritually-induced emotion lead to killing innocent people and abusing and exploiting vulnerable others? How has transcendent and awe-invoking spirituality become so evil?

As a former psychologist I remain curious about the human condition. For some reason, our minds have the capacity to experience awe with its sense of transcendence and ecstasy. Our brains provide the neurological structures for this to occur. Why?
    Over the history of humanity shared ecstatic experiences likely had the role of bonding together groups of people to common purpose. The Shaman would maintain the coherence of the tribe with intensely evocative rituals. The three modern examples I’ve given also describe the ecstatic in the context of tribe, tight knit groups of individuals sharing beliefs and intense emotional experience which provides a sense of purpose and common motivation. These modern examples illustrate how destructive leaders can create ecstatic contexts to self-gratify at the expense of others, either sexually or in their intoxication with power. They do so by contextualizing their behaviour within a supposed spiritual or holy cause. 
    This got me thinking of the appendix, a body part that can run amok and threaten one’s life, a body part we can survive without if it has to be removed. So I looked it up. The current understanding of the role of the appendix is to store healthy bacteria and contribute to immune functioning. As much as it provides a perilous risk if it becomes infected it also can promote health. Perhaps we can think of the role of ecstatic experience is to provide life with a dose of the divine to keep us healthy as individuals, a reminder there is more to life than just our day-to-day existence. 
    I’m a believer in the benefits of Yoga for physical and mental resiliency, for a deepening of one’s embodied sense of self. Teaching within the Christian faith can motivate us toward making our world a more loving place. However, we must remain vigilant that spiritual practices emphasizing the ecstatic can also be vectors for other dangerous motives and outcomes. 
        
My life work has been in the business of emotion. 
    In the past I did so when practicing as a psychologist. In psychotherapy I helped clients identify and modulate their subjective emotional experience so it could provide a sense of meaning without becoming disorienting, harmful or impeding adaptive functioning. 
    Now in this creative time of my life, I consider my musical compositions to be “what emotion sounds like”. My writing intends for the reader to experience a range of emotions as they identify with characters navigating the circumstances of plot. 
    In these endeavours I’ve sought balance. The subjectiveness of emotion needs to be balanced with contextual realities appreciated through critical thought. At the core of our motivation must be the wellbeing of others as well as the fulfillment of self. In neither, the therapeutic nor the creative, should self-gratification and control over others be the motive. 
    In treasuring the wellbeing of others, I’ve experienced another sense of the divine, one rooted in respect and compassion. It doesn’t involve ecstatic experience, nor does it harm to others through self-gratification and imposing personal power. The divine is simply present, subtly present, when we act motivated by love and grace, when we celebrate others rather than oppress or use them for our own purposes.

I’m in the middle, emoting.
    At a coffeeshop table to my left is a young woman I’ve never met before. On my right, one of the regulars. Both are listening. Both have a zoned out expression on their faces. Oh, perhaps I should say I’m emoting through my music, a newly composed song played on the digital keyboard. Each of my songs distills some aspect of my subjective sense of self, emotions and all.
    After I’d finished the song, the young woman on the left and the regular on the right each tell me where their minds had gone with the music. Their accounts didn’t match, nor did they fit with where my mind had been when I composed the piece nor how it impacts me as I practice it.
    The question is this: If I’m trying to communicate something in particular with my music, something from inside myself, like somewhere I’d been or someone I knew, is it getting through into the minds of my listeners? Probably not. Apparently, they have their own thoughts and imaginings in listening to it.
    So, am I doing it wrong then?
    Probably not.

So I’m reading one of my stories to a small group of people.
    The characters erupted from the deeper recesses of my mind allowing me to craft them into words. The plot oozed out the same way. The dialogue had been transcribed as if I was taking dictation. All of this came from somewhere within me.
    As I read aloud I watch the flow of emotions on listener faces (a residual side effect of being a psychotherapist all those years). The muscles around the eyes and mouths of my listeners spasm to reflect amusement, sorrow or apprehension. I anticipate that at certain places in the story, certain emotional experiences are likely to infect the minds of the listener … the same emotions I had experienced as I wrote those passages. They usually do.
    So after the story is finished we talk about it. I hear about someone’s Aunt Edith, or about a kitchen ritual from someone’s childhood, or a time when a particular something had happened to them (something sort of related to the plot of the story but not actually in the plot). 
    Do I hear my social commentary on the human condition distilled into my characters and story line? Probably not. Did I do something wrong in my efforts to convey that social commentary?
    Probably not.

When I was working as a mental health professional there were two different approaches to treatment. One can be described as “the professional knows best”. Therapists were supposed to believe researchers and esteemed psychiatrists had definitively figured out all the diagnoses with their lists of symptoms. When it came to helping, we were to apply to our diligently diagnosed condition the “best practice” therapies that were statistically better than other therapies in comparison studies. This presupposed what was best for the client was what had been written up in the professional books and journals. We knew we were doing the right thing when the client voiced acceptance of our technical terms and complied with our approaches. 
    Was I good at that as a psychologist?
    (You know the refrain by now…). Probably not.
    The other approach was to start with the client, the person rather than the diagnostic manual and therapy theories. It involved understanding how they experienced the world, what connected to what to create distress and the inability to function. It was so much more than labelling a particular struggle as a symptom to be aggregated into a disorder. It was understanding the complexity within the client that gave rise to their difficulties and distress. 
    The knowledge I gained from years of university and professional development activities helped me to know what to be curious about. My training as a family therapist was a great supplement to my knowledge of psychiatric disorder. But the most effective help for the client came from understanding the client’s uniqueness, that rather than how they could be reduced to a diagnostic term and targeted with a proven intervention.
    What my clients needed was respect and companionship secure enough to explore what they felt and how they were trying to think through what they were experiencing. That companionship wasn’t a set of therapeutic maneuvers but was a hook-up of our minds. This hook-up came with my own subjective experience of their emotions (a phenomenon a way up and beyond that of empathy) and an appreciation of the schemas organizing their lives. Once we had that starting point we were able to find a way out of the distress they felt. 
    For the most part all I had to offer were questions and observations. Thanks to the science of psychology I came equipped with knowing how the human mind processes information and engages with the world around. Bringing this knowledge I could come up with alternate ways the client might think about a situation or things they could try. But what I suggested was never more than just possibilities and options. The authorship of change for the client always needed to be what resonated within them.

And so, getting back to those different subjective experiences of the listeners in the coffee shop. It’s not important that they replicate within themselves what was in my mind as a composer. What is important is that they experience something of themselves when they listen.
    Each week at the coffee shop I see patron or two with the distant stare as they look toward the piano, or perhaps it’s a pre-schooler moving in time with my music. There’s a passage in the Christian Gospels about Jesus feeling his power flowing out of him to a person who'd touched the hem of his clothing. That’s the feeling I get when I sense my listener is experiencing something within their own subjectivity, doing so in harmony with the subjectivity I poured into composing and playing the piece. 
    It’s what music is all about. Probably.
    No. Actually. 
    Well, for me anyway.

I’m impressed. You’ve opened a page that will require a five minute read. Most people wouldn’t.
    Social media has trained us to be snackers when it comes to reading. Posts and memes are like potato chips. We keep consuming one after another until they sicken us. Our craving for something significant remains unsatisfied. Political opinion is all tribal declarations now, not about the good of society and the wellbeing of others as well as ourselves. Opinions fed by other opinions corrode our ability to think for ourselves.
    But there is another sort of reading, reading to help us to think more deeply, add nuance, challenge existing beliefs and opinions. If you read my blog, you’re probably such a reader.
    Six years ago I decided I’d read to broaden my understanding of the world. It had gotten progressively narrowed with my life work as a psychologist. Back then I had to read to stay current with professional practice competency. What was “current” in the professional literature was ideologically constricted by the culture of the profession.
    And so in retirement my decision was to alternate fiction and non-fiction books. You can find the bookshelves of several dozen books and their reviews elsewhere on this website (Wilton’s Reads). I’ve been doing this for six years now, and then … suddenly … 
    My last non-fiction (actually it was a two book set) mentioned a novel that was also worth reading. Fiction and non-fiction could be connected, not separate pursuits but about the same thing. 
    Well, that’s interesting.
    I’d noticed the majority of readers stick to one or the other. There are fiction readers (often confined to a particular genre) and there are non-fiction readers (often confined to a particular discipline). For a writer of non-fiction (a professor of history, no less) to mention a worthwhile novel busts the barrier down.
    So here it is: Timothy Snyder, in his back pocket book On Tyranny mentioned the value of reading Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being.
    So I read it. 
    Oh, I should mention a friend had also recommended the novel to me, because a family member had recommended it to her and they’d both loved it. Such is the way with books that make one think. 
    As I dug more deeply into Snyder’s historical and philosophical analysis in his subsequent book On Freedom it was clear that Kundera’s powerful, provocative and disturbing story had influenced, perhaps even was a source for, the central theme in Snyder’s two books. Of course, there were other aspects of Snyder’s life experience and academic career as a historian stewed together in On Freedom. However …, well, I shall explain.     
    Snyder talks about two different ways of relating to others. One relational pattern is transactional and self-serving. Those relationships are predicable and constraining. They can lead to oppression and exploitation. Consider social media with its algorithms and misinformation. But then there’s another relational pattern, the empathy-driven acceptance of, and engagement with, others. For us to be truly free, all people need to have the self-same freedom we wish for ourselves. Within that freedom we act in solidarity with others to promote the wellbeing of all.
    The contrast of these two relational patterns is illustrated in Kundera’s novel written forty years before. The novel’s tragic plot takes us deeply into the subjective lives of its characters. The central character, Tomas, is trapped in a sexual addiction, iconic of the self-serving relationship pattern. He has glimmers within himself of the more fulfilling, other way of relating but can’t break his addictive behaviour. Tomas’ partner, Tereza, manifests a much deeper and more meaningful relationship pattern and engagement with the world around her.
    What strikes me is the publication order of these two books. The subjective depiction of the theme was written first in the Kundera’s novel (published 1984). Snyder’s objective analysis was published in 2024. Snyder adopts this as a template in On Freedom, reflecting on his experience of earlier times in his life as a foundation for the thought process later. Is there a fundamental rhythm here? Do we know through experiencing first, sensing there is something there, then we seek to understand and explain it?
    This has taken me back to being a psychotherapist and the years I spent supervising psychologists coming into the practice. The culture of professional psychology devalues the subjective, endeavouring to make the whole process objective and transactional. Graduates in applied psychology come into the therapy room after years absorbing an objectified view of human adaptive dysfunction and emotional suffering. They’d learned diagnostic algorithms, theories of treatment and the protocols for applying them. 
    Then, alas, my unsuspecting supervisees got me! 
    I often asked the provocative question “how did you feel when you were with that client?” I intended the question to aid in understanding the subjective experience of the client with others, the ways others would react or respond to them. But the question itself took my supervisee out of the objective world of symptom and disorder into the interpersonal world, the real world in which the subjectivity of one person engages with the subjectivity of the other. 
    Over the course of my career I came to believe the subjective self of the psychotherapist bubbles forth from deeper processes of the human mind, the place of integration for knowledge and experience, the well-spring of creativity and intuition. Out of this subjective self comes exquisite awareness and genuine presence with the client.
    Of course, all of this is a matter of balance. Throughout my career I still valued the work of the science side of psychology, it’s just that it couldn’t stand alone. Standing alone it is objectifying and transactional. Likewise, when there is only subjectivity, judgmental attitudes and exploitive behaviours emerge. 
    When both are held in balance, knowledge emerges into the sphere of wisdom, empathy is fueled by compassion rather than being a therapy technique, and the therapy room becomes unpredictably rich in supporting the wellbeing of the client. 
    I will keep reading non-fiction because it tells me about the world. I will keep reading fiction because it tells me about what it is like to live in the world. And I’ll try to keep my snacking to a minimum.