Me and A Gun - Tori Amos Live

The power of this song, for me, comes from the paradox of Tori singing it - her voice is soft and light and controlled (well, with the odd wrenched lift and cry) but the emotional labour and emphasis of the song  is carried in the expressiveness of her face. I've seen other performances where the characters in the story seemingly flit across her face as she sings the lines, and she flirts with the audience a little in the beginning, small smiles and steely eyes and quirked eyebrows and tongue to the corner of the upper lip, to end up dragged into the current of despair and anguish and hopelessness, a torture that is the direct response to her experience.

She says it took her seven years to open up, to allow vulnerability to be intertwined into self-expression sufficiently to release herself from the psychological suffering that was an outcome of the rape:

"In the song, I say it was Me and a Gun but it wasn't a gun. It was a knife he had. And the idea was to take me to his friends and cut me up, and he kept telling me that, for hours. And if he hadn't needed more drugs I would have been just one more news report, where you see the parents grieving for their daughter. And I was singing hymns, as I say in the song, because he told me to. I sang to stay alive [italics mine]. Yet I survived that torture, which left me urinating all over myself and left me paralysed for years. That's what that night was all about, mutilation, more than violation through sex.


I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability."

My mind chases over and over the lyrics:

'I don't think you'll be back in three days time
So you choose well'

I resonate, far far too strongly, perhaps, with these lines.


Not Gods. Not Eternity. Not Ephemeral. Not Known.

Contemporary Castration

An interesting component of my coursework:


Modern Day Emasculations: Triumphs, Tragedies, and Transcendence
Various populations of genetic males seek either chemical or surgical castration in order to change their life. These range from advanced prostate cancer patients who are simply trying to improve their chances of survival, to male-to-female transsexuals who are trying to change their fundamental identity as male. In his lecture, Professor Wassersug will focus on modern day voluntary eunuchs – males who desire to be emasculated yet do not wish to be female. Some have a nonspecific Gender Identity Disorder, others a Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and some have extreme sadomasochistic paraphilias (fetishes). Professor Wassersug will shed light on what motivates these men – why, how, and where they get castrated, and the consequences of their castration.

When: 7th May at 4pm
Where: DT A Lecture Theatre, Heydon Laurence Bldg (A08), The University of Sydney

Dark Beautiful Things

'The Sacrifice' composed by Michael Nyman, from the movie 'The Piano' (1993) written and directed by Jane Campion.

The Contours of the Death Drive

A summary of a paper by Otto Kernberg (see reference below).

Not for the feint-hearted, in some ways this material is kind of like an episode of Grey's Anatomy directed at the psyche rather than the body, and without the attractive American actors.

Repetition compulsion, sadism and masochism, negative therapy reactions and depression resulting in suicide are all explored in this paper, and Kernberg draws the conclusion that the general dominance of aggressive affects can count for much of the explanatory power of the ‘death drive’. The theories of Eros and Thanatos are proposed by Freud to be fundamental motivational principles that have implications for the formation symptoms and unconscious schemata.  Through biological study we know that the primary motivational system for humans consists of affects of a positive and negative activation. Embedded libidinal positive and negative affects are implicated in fantasies of love and hatred. (p.1010)

Kernberg (2009) identifies the death drive as ‘a dominant unconscious motivation towards self-destructiveness’.  It may extend beyond the bounds of the self to imply the destruction of others.

Kernberg captures aggression, as per Freud, as arising from the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Biological preparation in the service of territoriality or the competition of males for females is seen as the ground upon which more complex manifestations of the death drive emerge, including repetition compulsion, sadism and masochism, negative therapeutic reaction, suicide and self-destructive development in group processes. (p.1012)

The repetition compulsion is the repeating of the same destructive behaviour while being resistant to analysis.  Repetition compulsion can be a working through of a conflict or a traumatic relationship, and it may reflect a re-kindling of primitive processes embedded early in the behavioural chain. Identification with the perpetrator of the trauma may be one other way that the compulsion becomes apparent, where an effort to reverse the roles and place someone else in the role of overwhelmed victim is a reified unconscious defensive response.

‘Andre Green...has described unconscious identification with a ‘dead mother’, that is, a severely depressed mother who had chronically frustrated the needs for love and dependency of her infant...The patient, in unconscious identification with a fantasied ‘dead mother’ denies the existence of all live relationships in reality as if he himself were dead to the world’ (p.1012).

Destructive narcissistic organisation in some clients presents as a level of denial that destroys the work of an envied therapist – a relentless self-destructive motivation becomes apparent as the client uses the denial to reassure and protect themselves from awareness of their avoidance of life tasks (p. 1013).

Kernberg parallels sadism and masochism with anorexia, in viewing the unconscious conflicts of anorectics as extending across a spectrum of Oedipal rivalry through to primitive self-hatred. Perversity in the form of a recruitment of love in service of aggression in order that the beloved object, seduced into helpfulness, is lured into a trap that ends with the destruction of the person in a symbolic or a real sense also qualifies here as self-destructive pathology. Some clients with profoundly forbidden oedipal urges or severe unconscious aggression simply destroy what they receive (p. 1014).

Negative therapeutic reaction is a severe self-directed destruction that may arise through guilt over receiving treatment or be apparent in narcissistic clients in envy of the therapist. Some patients too can only manifest a real relationship with a person who will destroy them. Pursued into countertransference, analysands may find themselves ‘acting out’ the roles which allow the client to escalate their self-destructive behaviour (p. 1015).

Suicidal tendencies in melancholia, where the introjection of an ambivalently loved and lost object draws aggression into that object in order that the ego might destroy it constitutes a very final form of self-destruction on behalf of the superego (p. 1015).

Kernberg describes the work of Melanie Klein in object relations, where she described the work of the depressive as overcoming a split between positive, idealised relations and aggressive projections onto the object. This split is a normal component of early development, but is a split that is returned to across all later mourning processes as the primal moment of object loss. Relentless self attack may form part of this split pathology where an attack is launched on the self from the superego, and in severely narcissistic personalities, abandonment to death, or suicide, emerges with the superego triumphant over a ‘depreciated, worthless world’ (p. 1016).

Self destruction may also emerge in social movements, where enemy formations, protected dependency and focussed aggression combined with the projection of a superego onto the leader may activate destructiveness at a social level (p.1017).

Severe self-destructive aggression is not a primary tendency but rather is an organised motivational system that is not simply ‘secondary to trauma’. The clinical view offers intrapsychic struggles between internalised sadistic representations and masochistic representations of the self. The internalised sadistic representations include projected and reintrojected aggressive impulses, plus traumatic experiences. Masochistic self representations include eroticisation of painful experiences and guilty suffering. What makes a self destructive person is a difficult question to answer, even for Kernberg. He points to some genetic determination of a negative affect dominance and for inadequate cognitive contextualisation of negative affect expressed as an insecure attachment style in early years. Traumatic experience early in life will often constitute the ground for a disorganised personality style that is self-destructive at core.  Intensity of negative aggressive affect and an internalised narcissistic structure emerge as consistently present in the dominant motivation for self destruction in clients.

Ref:

Kernberg, O. (2009). The concept of the death drive: A clinical perspective. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,, 90, 1009-1023.

Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus, qui labia Isaiae prophetae calculo mundasti ignito: ita me tua grata miseratione dignare mundare ut sanctum Evangelium tuum, digne valeam nuntiare. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen

Iube Domine benedicere. Dominus sit in corde meo, et in labiis meis: ut digne et competenter annuntiem Evangelium suum. Amen.



Cleanse my heart and my lips, O almighty God, who didst cleanse the lips of the prophet Isaias with a burning coal, and vouchsafe, through Thy gracious mercy, so to purify me, that I may worthily announce Thy holy Gospel. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Give me Thy blessing, O Lord. The Lord be in my heart and on my lips, that I may worthily and in a becoming manner, proclaim His holy Gospel. Amen.

More Psychoanalytic Dialogues

This is my little bit of early morning on-line, out-loud study/therapy, this time with Phillip Bromberg's article on eating disorders (see reference below).

Bromberg proposes that the symptomatology of 'problem' patients is an outcome of prolonged control of dysregulation of affect in infancy, possibly as an outcome of trauma. Where no trust has been established in the reparability of relationship, an experience of desire towards another becomes a threat of self-annihilation, every interaction signals a potential betrayal.

Taking a second view on Freud's psychoanalysis of Frau Emmy von N, Bromberg re-casts her hysterical symptoms as dissociative, where, as 'a trauma survivor, she protected herself against the future by treating the present as if it were nothing but a replica of the past'. This foreclosure of the moment is a 'basic adaptational function', a dissociation that protects the person from the impossibility of being self-reflective and in a state of fear while experiencing the security of a known object, all at the same time.

An incredibly vigilant mind is posed as the ground from which the anorexic 're-packages' his or her self-agency into a dynamic of dramatically purposeful activity, combined with significantly inhibited awareness of bodily signals. Bromberg lists Janet's research as identifying the amnesia that accompanies the anorectic's eating - specifying that via this model of dissociation we come to understand it as an 'organised system of self-experience', dominated by it's own affective states and it's own view of social phenomena (as a sufferer I'll attest to this anecdotally - I believe it's the biochemical changes in the brain that call forth a distinct set of personality traits, potentially entirely unrelated and non communicative with and to the personality as it would otherwise operate). The threat to self-continuity in a moment of trauma is completely survival oriented. Eating disorders patients live in a protracted relationship with that moment - survival becomes the orienting force around which the personality is structured.

Bromberg advocates the timely use of laughter in therapy to shift and incorporate more of the dissociated parts of the self into the presenting persona. This, he proposes, can help to overcome 'the absolute hegemony of the mind and the negation and abandonment of the body in anorexia'. Successful interpersonal transactions become the currency by which the anorectic can restore their own damaged capacity for affect regulation - in the language of attachment theory, this becomes the 'secure human relatedness' that, once reparability is established, allows affect regulation to function in a nonverbal and unconscious way.

While there are possible infancy dynamics involved, there is also the adult implication of needing to make choices in an affectively regulated schema. The need to make a choice can make possible a refusal to undertake it, or the possibility of making one but experiencing profound dread of loss of the choice forgone. Compensation and consolation are experienced in normal pathology - but for these patients, there is a recognition of insufficiency that is unbearable here. Desire, and desiring, are the cause of immense distress, and at their core, eating disorders can signal a loss of faith in the reliability of human relatedness.

In bulimia, the dissociation into the 'not-me' state is proposed to function as setting a 'marker at the edge of the self so that they can experience a limit and not become fragmented in a diffuse unnameable scatter'. These individuals 'starve themselves socially, erotically and nutritionally.

Enactments are proposed as necessary therapy where the processing of unprocessible experience can slowly be absorbed over time, by coming to understand a trusted relationship, that between therapist and client. It has to get ugly, in other words, before the internal reparation can take place and the reliance on the dissociation can be surrendered.

It's like walking backwards and forwards through a looking glass.



Bromberg, P.M. (2001). Treating patients with symptoms - and symptoms with patience. Reflections on Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11, 891-912.

Differentiation

I'm posting this partly to see where blogger puts it - it's an edit of a saved post from a little while ago.

Across the three years that I've been back at university as a student I've had more than one tutor in a brief fit of self-disclosure announce that 'we study that which we know well'.

Which doesn't leave me with very much wiggle space when it comes to posts like this one, on the human propensity to dissociate and self-destruct, an act undertaken somewhat, in the name of self-protection. This post is a summary of some of the main points that I'll need to address in my essay about self-destruction, taken from a paper written by Sharon Klayman Farber entitled 'Autistic and Dissociative Features in Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation'.

Succumbing to the illusion that bodily pain can obliterate psychic pain, some vulnerable individuals may enact self-harm as a means to derive feelings of power and omnipotence. Trauma which alters serotonergic activity may precipitate a propensity to harm the self, and a biologically based primal urge with a homeostasis of it's own has been proposed in some research, because self-mutilation and bulimia acts both have been found in numerous  other animal species.

Who needs to go that far to find either, really?

For people, Klayman Farber proposes that dissociation may be a useful lens through which we can view self-harm. A decentered self is proposed, where dissociative processes function to inhibit the integration of the mind with the psyche-soma. Outcomes of dissociated states are reflected in the symptoms of ASD, narcissistic pathology, eating disorder patients and individuals who are vulnerable to self-mutilation.


Ref:

Klayman Farber, S. (2008). Autistic and Dissociative Features in Eating Disorders and Self Mutilation. Modern Psychoanalysis, 33, 1, 23 - 49.

Applying theory back onto the theory

'What I propose is a shift in the type of knowledge that critics pursue and disseminate. Currently, most of our professional activity involves a production and distribution of knowledge about texts and their contexts. However satisfying this knowledge might be to those who produce it and consume it, I am not convinced that it is of great use, apart from it's obvious value as professional currency. I think it would be more beneficial for us to pursue knowledge of how various texts and discourses affect those who use them, and how teachers and institutions might operate on and with different types of discourse in ways that challenge students to grow without imposing [sic]preestablished ideas or values on them.' - Mark Bracher, Preface, 'Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change'.

So, what I like about this is that it angles to a shift in a perspective that I'd held dear for a little while, which is that it's very important to hold the cultural context of a text constant, and situate a writer and the writer's means of communication properly, before delving in looking for shreds and spangles of wisdom (or error, dependin' on who yer are) amongst the words and the full stops. Taking the 'de' out of deconstruction and building a little hologram of the lived world of the writer maps neatly onto a fantasy that I'd held, of being able to 'sense' an author, from the words they say and the way that they use them. It also allows that we see a little more deeply into a work than just the superficial storyline - we start looking for the meta-discourse, of how this writing fits with the author's other writings, the other authors of the same sorts of materials of the time, authors throughout history, dada da dada da da.

What I wonder, is why, at this particular juncture in cultural history, does this seem like an attractive and warranted approach to cultural criticism, for this author, Mark Bracher? Lacan readers and Lacanian analysts are far from stereotypical surface dwelling sycophants, but it would seem to me from the Preface and the Introduction so far, the book takes us across a surface perusal of whatever the material might be to look at the work's impact upon our three Lacanian registers, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real via narcissistic or anaclitic modes of desire. Taking Lacan deep into our hearts, but holding the material for analysis lightly upon our palm, perhaps, while we read.

The book takes it's analysis across pornography, political speeches, Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Keat's 'To Autumn'.

Heavens. Dear me, but I think 'I'm in'. :)


Ref:
Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, Discourse and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. London: Cornell Press.

Intersubjectivity and Neuroscience by Efrat Ginot

'This focus on enactments as communicators of affective building blocks also reflects a growing realisation that explicit content, verbal interpretations, and the mere act of uncovering memories are insufficient venues for curative shifts. Rather, a growing emphasis has been given to the transformative power embedded in unconscious affective interactions that bring to life and consequently alter implicit memories and attachment styles' (p. 317).

'Often described as relational impasses, enactments create an intersubjective field in which both patient and analyst find themselves in an ongoing emotional entanglement that temporarily diminishes the likelihood of meaningful reflection' (p.318).

'Fully dissociated was her enormous dread of being emotionally invaded and controlled. The painful, protracted enactment exposed core unconscious relational patterns and affective memories that characterised almost all of Tina's interactions with others - an intense fear of being emotionally violated and forced to adapt to the other and myriad automatic defences all designed to preserve her own sense of autonomy' (p.321).

'Enactments are in essence an expression of the repetition compulsion process whose unconscious form needs to be made conscious and integrated' (p. 322).

'Fear conditioning by the amygdala is an implicit form of learning occuring without conscious awareness from early infancy.... an emotional environment that is primarily one of anxiety and misattunement results in a more frequent activation of the fear systems and of automatic defences...the developing neural systems become skewed towards creating and repeating self-states characterised by heightened interpersonal anxiety and poor affect regulation rather than by positive affect and openness' (p. 323).


Introjective identification is mentioned but barely explored in this paper - I guess it's still a little difficult to take a neuroscientific perspective on what ToM and it's correlates might constitute. I need to dig a little deeper into the introjective process and the formation of Theory Of Mind in the developmental frame, though. I remember reading some somewhat derisive commentary from Freud about the Christian model of introjective identification - about grown adults requiring a visceral model of the Body and Blood of Christ which is the bread and wine consumed, in order that the qualities of Christ are symbolically interred, as our own. The heartbreaking way that the Christian story is literally taken and is used to create division amongst peoples - even today - tells me that we haven't come so far with developing symbolic thought processes as Freud might have hoped for back in 1915.

It's interesting to watch my own thought processes as I delve through these texts on psychoanalysis - something in me wants to offer Christianity, the whole, blinking movement of it, a psychological account of why it's so important to shift narrow, literal ways of living within a Christian story, a Christian context. To offer all the peoples of the world a chance to see symbols for what they are, appreciate the flexibility of their existence and the inherent paradox of being a human being with conflicting thoughts and feelings and no absolute, real, finite self.

Which is of course what the Jesus discourse precisely determines to establish.

Hmm. Me and my grand, unifying theories - I too, possibly most of all in this way, am subject to the pathology of a system.

Intriguing.


Ginot, E. (2007). Intersubjectivity and Neuroscience: Understanding enactments and their therapeutic significance within emerging paradigms. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24(2), 317-332.

http://www.ahealthymind.org/ans/library/Ginot%20intersubjective-neuroscience%2007.pdf

The Fire of Four

With love, simply, for these two lines:


'If all time is eternally present


All time is unredeemable.' - Burnt Norton, TS Eliot







Verse IV of poem IV of the 'Four Quartets' by TS Eliot.

From 'Little Gidding':


IV



The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.



Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

Please

Please by U2. Words by Bono and the Edge.

So you never knew love
Until you crossed the line of grace.

And you never felt wanted
Till you'd someone slap your face.

So you never felt alive
Until you'd almost wasted away.

You had to win, you couldn't just pass
The smartest ass at the top of the class.

Your flying colours, your family tree
And all your lessons in history.

Please, please, please

Get up off your knees.
Please, please, please, please.

And you never knew how low you'd stoop
To make that call.

And you never knew what was on the ground
Till they made you crawl.

So you never knew that the heaven
You keep

You stole.

Your Catholic blues, 

Your convent shoes,
Your stick-on tattoos 

Now they're making the news.

Your holy war, 

Your northern star
Your sermon on the mount from the boot of your car.

Please, please, please

Get up off your knees.
Please, please, please
Leave me out of this, please.

So love is hard
And love is tough
But love 

Is not
What you're thinking of.

September, streets capsizing
Spilling over down the drains
Shards of glass, 

Splinters like rain
But you could only

Feel your own pain.

October, talk getting nowhere.
November, December; 

Remember
We just started again.

Please, please, please
Get up off your knees.
Please, please, please, please.

So love is big
Is bigger than us.

But love

Is not
What you're thinking of.

It's what lovers deal
It's what lovers steal

You know I've found it

Hard to receive

'Cause you, my love

I could never believe.

Shamatha

I've just yesterday come back from a 6 and-a-bit day Shamatha retreat with B Alan Wallace. We were meditating for up to four hours a day, and my eyes have yet to adjust properly to the pixel-glow of the computer screen, or my ears to the harsh growl of traffic. Possibly one reason that yogis are so well preserved is that they are never really subject to these small stresses of daily life.

It's rare that I actually fall more in love with a teacher for having spent more time under their tutelage - I usually end up finding some sort of irritation which means I stop digesting, in a way, some of the content that the teacher so graciously makes available. This proved not to be so with B Alan Wallace. It's not just that the depth of his training in the Hindu, Theravadin, Vajrayana and Dzogschen traditions is profound, it's not just that the veracity of his intellect is breathtaking as he sweeps up the class into a rampant run through quantum cosmology. It's that rare quality in a teacher, where, addressing a student's question, he is able to attend to and peel away each layer, each point that has presented itself in the question that has been posed. While there is a sort of crusty outer shell that presents in the 'formal' version of the teacher B Alan Wallace, the man in the chair consistently displayed warmth, humility, honesty and sensitivity as he introduced us firstly to mindfulness of breath practices, secondly to methods by which we can settle our mind in it's natural state, and finally to a shamatha/vipassana crossover stepping stone, awareness of awareness meditation.

I completely failed at the mindfulness of breathing practices that were initially taught as diffuse body awareness practice, entailed in the savasana pose per Yogic tradition. By the time sitting was encouraged and we were focusing our attention on our 'gentle vase' breathing (holding the tummy out like a pot) I was getting the hang of it, which was just in time for all my affective responses to the preceeding tumultuous 3 weeks to clamber their way up my nadi channels and let me know the true state of affairs, as it were, in my psychosomatic energy field. That took a little while to calm down (actually, I'm still catching up with the remaining subtle sensations that send out little beacon reminders, every now and then).

We then visited the Hinayana Theravadin tradition to experience one practice path through to samadhi (shamatha), that is, single pointed concentration on the breath sensations arising under the nostrils. The idea is with practice, we become aware of the sensations of the air at this juncture even when we are not breathing, those that are occuring between breaths when we use pranayama control. Focussing intently on this point, the preliminary, acquired and counterpoint signs may emerge, with enough (read: many many and 12 hours a day, at that) hours of practice.

We then moved along to sample access to the first jnana achieved through settling the mind in it's natural state - focussing the mind on it's own space and watching the thoughts arise and fall from whence they came, with minimal attention to sensory stimuli. This practice is the most similar to the regular meditation that we do at Vajrayana Institute at the drop-in sessions - recognising when we are thinking, and laying the soft feather of recognition of thinking onto that thought, allowing it to dissipate by itself without shooting it out of the mind like a clay pigeon. This Vajrayana practice includes extending the felt sense of 'mind like space' in every direction, as far as it can be recognised as extended.

Throughout this practice B Alan Wallace began laying the seeds to cultivate achievement of access to the first jnana through shamatha via the next practice that he taught, awareness of awareness meditation. This practice, in particular has extended my meditative repertoire into a new and fruitful field (I think he would call this 'juicy'). I've found if I place my attention in the heart centre and focus on attending to the flow of knowing, I'm achieving previously unfoundered levels of stability in the vision free, sound free space that I get into when I'm in my most stable, and vibrant meditation. BAW did mention that the vision/sound free kind of state shouldn't really be achiveable until we're doing 8 - 12 hours of meditation per day, so I still don't know whether this ability 'thing' is just a mere distraction that I need to keep working through. An insight from this retreat is that maybe rather than dealing with it as a distraction, I can and should be actually focussing on stabilising my 'flow of knowing', the knowing of knowing, this way, upon it. Yum. :)

I have pages upon pages of notes about the difference between mindfulness and samadhi, Geshe Rabten's tips for dharma combat sessions on the madhymika that run straight through the night, methods by which mindfulness practices might be incorporated into aged care environments (woo hoo!) and a level of understanding of the system of Ayurvedic medicine that I would have been unlikely to have picked up anywhere else. Despite B Alan's pleadings that Buddhist epistemology comes philosophy free I've been left curious enough about the Yogacarin metaphysical baggage to begin to start digging around to find out what he was talking about, I've got enough glimmerings of the Dzogschen tradition to be welcoming the thought that maybe I 'do' need to pick up these teachings next via deepening my understanding of the relevant initiatory practices, and I've been inspired to think about the possibilities of leaving mundane life for 12-14 months to actually go achieve shamatha - achieve the first jnana in order to better be of service on the planet.

To top this great week off, the retreat was around the corner at the Sisters of St Joseph convent in Baulkham Hills. Before we hit 'silence', on day one, I got to catch up with Sr Katherine, who had just the day before moved out here to this convent, from Croydon. Carparks are vastly underrated as social/spiritual networking sites, and it was a blessing and a pleasure to see her smiling, pixie-like self, in the flesh, once again. :)

The picture above is the chapel which we were based in for eight hours each day. I took this photo because the sun was playing the role of our mind, so vividly, resting it's luminance in the space between things - here Christ, and Buddha, on Good Friday.

Brings a new sense to the word 'fitting', for me, for sure.

I feel privileged and humbled that I was able to take the time out to attend this retreat. Cheers to Ven. Chokyi-la and to Simon, for encouraging me to give it a go.