A woman caught me as I stumbled on the bus yesterday. I sat next to her and she said, “We’ve all got to be kind to each other now,” and something extraordinary happened between us.

I held her hands. If you don’t live in London you may not know how utterly bizarre it is to hold a strangers hand on a bus. It’s unusual to make eye contact! But this woman was radiating something powerful that compelled me to take hold of her hands.

“What did you vote?” she asked. I’m old enough to remember when it was considered incredibly rude to ask how a person voted, but I answered her anyway.

“I voted UKIP,” she said and turned to look me straight in the eye. All I could think of to say was, “Why did you do that?”

“My next door neighbours are on benefits and they work cash in hand,” she said, clearly wanting my response. It’s not the most insightful or professional thing I’ve ever said but what came out was,
 “So what?”

“Don’t you think that’s wrong?” she asked, and I said that they probably had very good reasons for taking the terrible risk of being caught. “But they’re from Iran or Iraq or somewhere, and I’ve had cancer and I work. Don’t you care that they’re on benefits?”

I told her I couldn’t care less and asked her where she came from - English wasn’t her first language. She said her mother and father were from different nations and that she was from yet another. “My boys tell me the same,” she said, “They say that what my neighbours do is none of my business.” We looked at each other, holding hands very tightly, and then she got off the bus.

I was dumbfounded. The whole interaction had taken about 3 minutes.

It would be foolish to extrapolate an entire theory from that short connection, but isn’t there something about her anxiety, her desperate need to understand, that’s reflected in the national response to the election? She won’t be the only person to have voted against her own interests – a non-White, not-affluent woman who has had cancer – because her need to punish, to punch down, to harm people who are more vulnerable than she is, is greater than self preservation.

An accumulation of other stresses would have preceded this outpouring and perhaps the election was the final straw. I have no idea. But it seems to me that the single most important thing that this woman said, that goes beyond politics and ideology, beyond feeling gleeful or shocked or devastated at the outcome of this election, is the very first thing she did and the very first thing she said to me:

She caught me when I stumbled.

She said, “We’ve all got to be kind to each other now.”

Back in July ’14 I wrote about compulsory therapy for people with mental illness on benefits. This policy idea was not based on any research – which demonstrates that making people go to counselling is counterproductive – it was a kite-flying exercise to test public opinion: just how much cruelty are we prepared to accept?

Something similar was floated last month this time seeing if the public will accept enforced major surgery. Just like the compulsory therapy business forcing obese people to have surgery perversely ignores all the research:

“ . . . any mandated program should have a strong evidence base for success.       Unfortunately, diet and lifestyle interventions have restricted, often transient, benefits due to biological adaptations, that act to sustain high bodyweight. It is therefore important to ask whether requiring people to participate in weight-loss programmes, despite a high likelihood of failure, is acceptable from the point of view of an individual, provider, or society. Although there is some success with pharmacological treatments for obesity, the only treatment for obesity that has been proven to be successful for substantial long-term weight loss and improved quality of life in a high proportion of people is bariatric surgery."

"It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept the support and treatment that could help them get back to a life of work." This is the standard announcement to persuade people who pay tax (and many who don't earn enough to pay tax) to agree with policies that provably worsen medical problems. 

We all know people who pay tax and don’t work hard. Sometimes it’s us. Whenever I hear “Hard Working Tax Payer” I hear the Shadow echo, “Idiot” because that’s how this term is in fact being used.

At the end of Downfall, a dramatisation of the last days of Hitler’s life, a boy is shown returning home to find his mother lynched by the Greifkommando. This paramilitary group murdered ‘cowards and traitors’ – old men, children, women – to create a climate of terrified compliance. In the film a civilian in a typically Bavarian hat is part of the Greifkommando: he’s not a soldier, he won’t be court martialed or shot if he doesn’t murder people, he’s just along for the pleasure of instilling terror and, if he gets the chance, killing people weaker than himself. He uses his righteous love of country as justification.

Some of us succumb easier than others to this psychopathy. We can’t deal with complexity. Immigrants are bad: it used to be that immigrant simply meant non-white but now we’ve broadened the term to include people from Eastern Europe. People on benefits have always been sneered at but now the disabled are also Scroungers. We can’t cope with the fact that the highest proportion of benefits - 47% - go to pensioners so we ignore that. We’re comfortable with Them and Us where They are something to be despised and therefore so much easier to devastate. 

This is simply human nature. Germans didn't suddenly go bonkers in 1938, any more than Rwandans, American settlers (AKA the British) Cambodians, former Yugoslavians, Turks or any other group of people who lost their sense of humanity. Part of all of us, myself included, loves to hate. Our job is to resist that, to retain our empathy and intellect. Because apart from anything else it might be you who is cut from the herd next.

Once again, our attitudes are being assessed to see just how far down that road Hard Working Tax Payers have gone. Are you happy to force someone to have major surgery?

Are you?

This is a great description of the process of accepting and submitting to emotional pain in order to address it. Go and visit Bethany Webster's page to see more about her work.



Posted on September 13, 2014


Sitting with our pain is such a simple act and yet it can be one of the hardest things to do.

Feeling our pain and not rushing in to fix it, numb it, avoid it, or cover it up takes enormous courage. This is where surrender comes in. We reach a point in our healing where we’ve read all the books, consulted all the gurus or tried all the fancy techniques and all that is left is the last thing we want to do: Feel our painful feelings. Ironically, sitting with our pain is precisely what will eventually bring us all the things we were looking for through avoiding it.

A major key to healing emotional wounding is the willingness to endure discomfort for the sake of transformation. This willingness is essential to truly coming out the other side of childhood wounds.



Discomfort can come in many forms: 

• Being misunderstood by family members
• Sitting with your own pain and just feeling it and allowing it to be there
• Going through a period of anger or grief without knowing when the uncomfortable feelings will end
• Having low energy or a feeling of being lost and unsure
• Allowing yourself to be vulnerable and receive support from others
• Distance from people who you used to be close to

Our culture promotes the idea of immediate gratification and instant results. It takes enormous courage and strength to stick with the unglamorous process of healing that has a timeline of its own. In addition to the cultural component, there is also the survival instincts within us that tell us to fight or take fight when we feel threatened. That is why having support in the healing process is essential.



To an unhealed inner child, the only way it knows how to soothe itself is to act in accordance with the patterns that were imprinted by the family of origin, but usually those are precisely the patterns that are causing the pain. This keeps us trapped in a loop. The answer is to cultivate the skill of mothering and soothing our inner child while we make new choices that better reflect our true desires and needs. This inner bond is what helps us to effectively separate from family and cultural patterns that cause suffering.

For most of us, growing up involved a series of self-betrayals in which we had no choice but to create an inner split in order to survive. The split usually involves some form of numbing our feelings and rejecting ourselves in order to be accepted by our families. Healing involves the recovery of our ability to fully our feelings and thus, to feel and express the truth of who we are without shame.



While we are surrounded with messages to avoid our pain, both externally in the culture and internally through early coping mechanisms, it is through being present with our own pain and allowing our feelings to flow that healing really happens.

Truth is found outside our comfort zone. Outside the comfort zone is the space in which we separate from dysfunctional patterns that have been ingrained in us by our culture and families. 

There are two main phases of learning to endure discomfort for the sake of transformation. Each phase may overlap at times, but generally we move from resistance to surrender.



1) RESISTANCE

Here we usually have a great deal of aversion and avoidance of looking at the painful feelings we experience. We may seek various ways to numb out or repress the truth of what we are feeling. Resistance can take the forms of self-sabotage, forgetfulness, overwhelm and addictions. Sometimes resistance can be helpful as an inner boundary of slowing things down until we are ready to fully see something.  And sometimes it can be avoidance of what we know we must face. It takes careful self- examination to see which form of resistance is operating. We may experience some resistance at each new level of healing, but as we grow, we can better recognize resistance and more easily move through it.

2) SURRENDER

Most of us surrender simply because the pain of resistance becomes too great. We eventually cross a threshold where we’ve learned to trust that embracing pain rather than running from it is what provides relief.  We fully taste the joy and freedom that come from being in contact with the REAL within oneself. There is nothing like having moved through the pain and into the joy of feeling ONE within yourself. The peace of inner alignment: feeling and expressing your authentic feelings without the need to defend them.



There dawns a harmony between your personal imperfections and your irreplaceable part in the greater perfection of life. 

Eventually the longing and hunger for living your truth overshadows all other desires, including the desire to be free of pain. It is seen that this hunger for truth is trustworthy and will lead you to what you need in each moment. And  sometimes what you need is to embrace is yet another level of inner pain. The moments of relief and bliss that open up through having embraced your pain makes it all worth it. Over and over we learn that the act of embracing and being present with our pain is what connects us with the larger truth of who we are.

I think that one of the reasons why the crucifixion is such a powerful, pervasive symbol in the western world is because it symbolizes precisely what can be profoundly difficult: the willingness to accept and be present with our painful feelings.



A new inner space is created where you have permission to live from the REAL. 

As we do the inner work, eventually a conviction arises; a quickening, a hunger and fierce commitment to living one’s truth. A desire develops to live from each moment from within the fire of your original self. Each moment begins to represent a new, fresh opportunity to live from simple, open, awareness of what is.

We see that awareness itself is an embrace. 

We start on the painful periphery and as we become increasingly skilled in enduring discomfort and the uncertainty of the unknown, there lies the potential to merge with the holy presence that lives at the center of our pain and realize that is the truth of who we are.



Many of us have a feeling of homesickness deep within. A nameless longing and aching grief. Many of us experienced this as children in relation to our mothers, a feeling of being groundless and adrift. Embracing the homesick feeling within the mother wound leads us to eventually come to a place where we realize that we can never be truly abandoned. This becomes possible by becoming a loving inner mother to our inner child as we embrace her deepest despair.

In that despair is a door; a door to our source, the unified consciousness in which we are one with all.

In this way, our pain is a messenger. A messenger telling us it’s time to come home; to the primordial home within, which is the realization of our true identity as consciousness, the knowing that we are spirit and can never be truly harmed or abandoned because we are one with all. I recall moments in my own healing process  when I would process layers of grief within the mother wound; the sense of worthlessness and wanting to die.  And in that  willingness to simply feel the full scope of that incredible despair and grief, I knew that this was the bottom. There was no pain deeper than that. That pain was the ground. And by standing on that ground and being present with my deepest pain, I was free.



Feeling our pain frees us from it. 

By sitting with our pain, we begin to recognize that the pain we have felt is not the truth of who we really are. We begin to see that the open, loving presence that we embody as we embrace our own pain is who we are, our true identity underneath all our other identities.

The culmination of living as a “self” is to live as the “no-self”;  the vast, loving space that lovingly witnesses our pain and embraces it completely. This is what a healthy mother does for her child.  Author Rupert Spira has said that awareness is like the space in a room, it unconditionally accepts what happens in it. Likewise, in order to develop optimally, a child needs a mother who is unconditionally present and accepting of her. However, mothers are human beings with flaws who make mistakes. All of us receive some degree of wounding from our mothers.

Through that primary, holy wound, we are called to become that loving mother to ourselves…and to all life. 

As we embody the unconditional love of the inner mother, we become re-connected to life itself. We become re-connected to the birth-less and death-less center that is constantly born and dies in countless forms. This is the evolutionary step that lies within the pain of the mother wound.



As women, we grow up believing that a holy power lies outside of ourselves and in the healing process, we start to realize that what we most desire, that which is most holy, eternal and pure is inside of us and has always been there. In fact, it is us. Not just in one or some of us, but it lives equally in all of us, in all of life.

Because we are all connected, each time you lovingly embrace your own pain, you activate the power of oneness in all. 



© Bethany Webster 2014

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If you google 'Carnival' endless pictures of women catching a cold turn up. You won't see pictures like this one on the news, but for me this is one of the most fascinating parts of Carnival - Jouvert (a contraction of jour ouvert or 'daybreak') sees a small number of people walking Carnival route the wrong way round at dawn, throwing flour and paint at each other and along the route. I find this magical and inspiring, a real demonstration of the subversive and chaotic, a kind of secret ritual that allows and boundaries the following two days. 

Carnival is The World Turned Upside down, a time when some people pretend to be what they're not, things that are illegal at other times are now permitted, and feasting and revelry are indulged. Carnival is not, despite what it may seem, an advert for Top Shop or an opportunity for a politician to make a terrible arse of himself, it's a reminder that racism still exists and that magic remains possible. In the UK it's a farewell to Summer and a blowout before Autumn. Go out and have a ball.

Happy St George's Day, a day to appreciate the many, many benefits we have as people living in a first-world economy. 

The World Service broadcast a particularly interesting piece last night, on how France Must Change. High unemployment, a State-bound economy in the doldrums, strikes, laughable working hours, and now – get this! – legislation that prevents employees from responding to work emails after 6pm! What an outlandish and economically naive country.

Strange then, that France is ahead of our own Hard Working, endlessly striving, entrepreneurial economy, second only to Germany in Europe and fifth in the world. In a survey out today comes the news that “Britain has the lowest quality of life of 9 major European countries." 

France has the highest quality of life.

The weather has something to do with it as does our naturally cynical nature – we expect to be treated badly and so it comes as no surprise when we’re treated badly – but here’s a chilling analysis:

“We may still be enjoying the fourth highest household income in Europe, but the high cost of living means we are living to work.”

Person Centred counselling has a useful principle called the Locus of Evaluation. It proposes that when we’re allowed to remain in touch with how we genuinely feel we can make good choices; good for ourselves and good for the people around us. This is called The Internal Locus of Evaluation. The External Locus of Evaluation develops when we’re told how we must feel and criticised for feeling differently from the people around us. We have to ignore our genuine feelings to continue to be valued. People who function from an External Locus of Evaluation continue to look to people in authority to decide how they must feel and often feel absolutely dreadful, even if they determinedly continue to believe they are content with the way things are. You can read up on the theory here.

On Sunday the Mail felt it would be profitable to send an undercover reporter to a food bank and, despite noting that the reporter was asked lots of questions about his circumstances, recount that he walked away with £40 worth of groceries, unquestioned. In the past that would simply have added to the sneering disgust of the nation but this time it resulted in £35,000 in donations to the Trussell Trust.

Times and nations are not going to change much. Against all the evidence, as a country we’re going to continue believing that the French are lazy and on the verge of economic collapse whilst we lead the world in toughness and fiscal wisdom. But, as the Daily Mail incident demonstrates, individuals are now more than ever capable of effecting change. I’d propose that the conditions that bring individuals to the point of collapse are those that we are experiencing now. We’re being told one thing – that food banks are stupidly supporting evil people to lie around laughing at the Hard Working Tax Payer – when we know something very different – that food banks are a symptom of an unequal society, that the more unequal the society the more miserable society becomes and that we have the lowest productivity in the whole of the G7. Social media is a tool that individuals use to subvert propaganda, but attending to the messages that we constantly berate ourselves with is another, more difficult matter.

It can be profoundly sad and even disturbing to understand that many of the beliefs we hold dear are nothing but empty words, to realise that the way we've lived to this point has been largely meaningless and for someone else's benefit. It takes time to understand how it happens at all, but if you find yourself wondering about this kind of thing then you're ready to explore it. There's a lot to cherish in the English (and British) way of being, we'd be foolish to reject all of it, and there's a lot that needs to be examined too.





*Written by Cecil Rhodes, who left England at the age of 9.

Therapy has been criticised for encouraging solipsism. We focus on the needs of the individual in front of us often to a greater degree than anyone ever before, including parents. Counsellors know that if we create a place of boundaried safety, understanding and respect the client is likely to flourish.

Paradoxically, when a person is given total positive individual attention for 50 minutes a week as well as becoming more understanding of themselves they become better able to understand wider relationships. In some sense, a person in therapy needs to become child-like; to have their feelings valued so that they can value those feelings themselves; next to examine their situation with curiosity and respect; then to formulate some kind of plan for the future; and then go out and live it.

In many ways, therapy is a kind of parenting, allowing the client to move from distress, confusion and retreat from the world to understanding and renewed relationship with the world. Relationship is the be all and end all of therapy and ultimately of life.

Once or twice a week I spend a couple of hours listening to a local talk radio station to get a flavour of what people are thinking. Today’s debate was about the proposed tax break for parents, £2000 for every child under 12 where both parents work. Any number of childless people phoned in to ask why they should fund parents, their reasoning being, “If you can’t afford kids you shouldn’t have them.” Never mind that the rebate includes households with a joint income of up to £300,000. When asked who they expected to care for them when they were elderly, to maintain every part of society from midwives and schools to hospices and graveyards, they didn’t see the connection. They were only interested in their own income and didn’t want to support anyone other than themselves.

Last century, Communism was condemned for offering childcare. A mothers place was in the home taking care of her husband and children and often elderly relatives who had previously helped with housework, cooking and caring for children. Now, children live far from elderly parents who are maintained by strangers, childcare has taken the place of parenting and both parents are expected to work. It takes a lot of thought and strength to organise a family so that children spend more than 24 waking hours a week with their parents, a decision that almost always incurs a drop in status and a greater amount of personal satisfaction and contentment within the family.

Therapy gives a person the space and time to move from the infant position of memememe (where we all go when we’re distressed, confused and threatened) to the more adult viewpoint of how others affect us, how we affect others and the most healthy ways of engaging with that reality. We can pretend that other people don’t matter only as long as we accept that other people shouldn’t give a damn about us.

The Mid-Staff Enquiry will create a great deal of media noise but I’m not sure it will make much of a difference on wards where health care workers feel justified in taping a dummy to a sick infants face. That speaks to me of becoming utterly shut down and divorced from reality.

I trained as a nurse back in the 80’s and frankly didn’t like my job very much until I got off the wards. Part of my discomfort was that there was always too much work to be done by too few nurses. Part of my despair was seeing patients treated as ‘The Chest by the window” “The Abdomen in bed 10.” But we were never allowed to speak about patients with contempt and leaving anyone lying in their own waste was genuinely unthinkable, a personal failure that would be punished. This was during the first rabid set of cutbacks, when one qualified nurse and two students routinely looked after 30 patients.

An elderly care ward I worked on as a student was run by a self-satisfied nurse who cared not a jot for the people under her care. The routine for meals was to place as many patients as possible on a commode and put their food in front of them to save time. We quickly got used to doing this, especially since she was a bully and doctors and other professionals who attended the ward made no comment on it. This was a culture of box ticking so that the smug nurse, who could barely drag herself round the ward, could pay for her holidays. And even so, we fed patients who couldn’t feed themselves.

Is it surprising that “Bullying is endemic in the NHS”?

Nurses now no longer curtsy and avert their eyes when a surgeon graces the ward but health care remains a rigid hierarchy, and as in any hierarchy the most vulnerable are at the bottom of the heap: in the NHS that’s patients. It used to be that a sense of vocation and a national culture of pride in and respect for nurses gave nurses satisfaction and self-respect which didn't make up for the lack of a decent wage but went some way towards making it more bearable. I remember hating the ‘Angels’ label, I wanted higher wages and reasonable working practices, but in the endless grasping for 'professionalism' we got the worst of all worlds: unrepresentative wages, a loss of status and clearly a loss of purpose.

What kind of dehumanizing process does someone have to go through to leave people to starve to actual death, to lie unwashed for a month, to withhold pain relief? Were they born a casual torturer? Do casual torturers make their way to hospitals to get their kicks? Or is it that culture can be so strong as to actively create and reward people who behave like this and scapegoat those who whistleblow? The answer from today’s Francis Report, and from the experience of anyone who’s ever studied any group is a resounding Yes.

Mid Staffs is by no means alone in allowing grotesque failures of care and I suspect yet more revelations about abuse in hospitals will quickly come to light. Where people are vulnerable other people become abusive. That's been the case throughout history and we just need to say that out loud and deal with it. One of the ways of dealing with it is looking at the causes and cultures of good practice wherever it occurs - in a ward, an office, a children's home, a business, a charity. Why do some wards retain their staff, have great results and no complaints? Why do elderly people in some homes live longer and experience less illness? Even more valuable would be to take notice of the huge numbers of such studies which already exist and actually implement their recommendations.

We all are part of the culture around us which at present is frankly pretty crap. We all value and devalue certain kinds of people so that we can feel better about ourselves. When we become too comfortable with that we risk becoming shut down, divorced from reality, capable of doing shameful things.

During the 1990’s I co-created a temporary community that met four times throughout a year. The camps began as a way of us getting together cheaply but we very quickly discovered that living in close relationship to the natural world with no access to electricity, gas or anything other than a standpipe for running water inevitably led us to behave in different ways with each other and with the land, and that we valued these new ways of relating.

We had to share living and sleeping space to keep warm. Even in August the nights get cold and damp so it was an easy choice between freezing in the equivalent of a kite or snuggling down on carpets in a yurt heated by a woodburner. We cooked and ate together, pooling money, sharing tasks as diverse as chopping vegetables to keeping a fire going and we learned that we had to get on with it if we were to eat before dark – something particularly important for children and our more elderly members.

Living in nature is far from romantic. Nature can be cold and wet, can seriously sunburn your children, gets dark at 6pm, rains interminably, can be incredibly painful if you walk barefoot on frost, grab the blackthorn, rose or hawthorn without care and can poke you in the eye in the dark. Learning to live comfortably with these realities leveled the field in ways that were a revelation: people who were affluent couldn’t buy someone else to do it for them academically able people couldn’t just talk or teach about how much they knew about walking on a field at night. Small people, most often women, were often better at it than people who are bigger, often men. Children who didn’t get on at school suddenly discovered they were superb at chopping wood or keeping a fire going or putting up structures, skills that had a direct impact on the wellbeing of the whole community. There was kudos and respect for people of any age who kept the site ticking along and these were almost always people who did not usually experience kudos or respect in the rest of their lives.

Children and adults learned to work as a team, to take risks, to expand every sense, to go for a walk rather than have an argument, to seek knowledge from the natural world – particularly the wisdom of knowing that we will die evidenced by bird and mammal bones – to get cold and not get a cold, to be contentedly alone in a group, to live together, to seek solitude and to slow down. All without any risk of being knocked over by a car. There were certainly dramas and we learned to factor in very structured meetings where everyone could say how they were doing and be heard by everyone else. Some of the rules that evolved from experience were to not offer advice during these meetings, and to take responsibility for ones own physical and emotional wellbeing: getting enough sleep, eating and drinking enough. From time to time people became very upset indeed and, not being told what to do, not being given advice, not being shut up and not being allowed to dominate a camp, people also moved through their own feelings to a new place of understanding for themselves.

In research terms, we know that obesity is rising as people seldom leave some kind of chair, that the behaviours of many children are becoming disturbing, that attention disorders, anxiety and depression are rapidly increasing. Anecdotally, people are becoming less creative, less positively imaginative, more risk averse and terminally bored. We have lost contact with the earth, the elements and communal life. It’s superb to have ones own front door, washing machine, cooker and fridge, but we’ve also lost neighbourliness and places where our grandparents might meet to share physical work. This is why I’m so pleased about the New Economics Foundation report suggesting that if we work a 4-day week and promote gardening this will "provide the answer to every headline problem at the moment." From low unemployment to significantly reduced mental and physical health problems, spending less time obsessing about being seen to be a Hard Working Tax Payer and focusing more on creating, nurturing and simply living as part of the natural world can only be positive.