Within
In Northampton, on UK time.
Every night in my book opens the same way. The hour, the body, what’s in the room. It’s 21:07. Very little pain today. Haven is unsettled beside me. Dr Louie Gardiner’s Presence in Action taught me to do that on purpose. What are the facts? What are the feelings? What are the fictions? What am I here for? Ask, and the next thing changes.
A place is in me as much as I am in it. I learned that from Alan Rayner, in fourteen years of letters. Water shapes the land and is shaped by it. I’ve carried a sentence for years, and I’ve said it in rooms: Nature herself never excludes you. Only some people, in some places do.
The drawing on the first page has within at its centre, and home, work, community and cyberspace spiralling out from it. Ray Oldenburg gave me the first three, 5th Place the fourth. The fifth place is all of them at once, each in the other: being who we are, whichever room we’re in. Within is where that gets held. It starts here, where it all gets lived, and it isn’t a retreat from the other four: it’s the one thing I take into all of them. What follows is the practice, in the order 5th Place taught me: awareness, acceptance, action.
Awareness, acceptance, action is 5th Place’s own framework for change. This page keeps its order.
Awareness
Noticing what’s here before anything is done about it.
Four questions
Facts, feelings, fictions, purpose. Presence in Action is Dr Louie Gardiner’s practice, and the whole of it fits in one noticing: which of the four am I in right now? Notice, and what happens next changes.
I rode a red Honda seven hours from Northampton to Portobello to train with her. Four days. I arrived carrying a heavy load, and left able to untangle my facts, my feelings and my fictions. The people I met there didn’t reflect me back. Not mirrors. Windows.
Presence
The centre of the day. Before a day is told six ways there is the pause before any of them: the hour, the body, what’s in the room. Presence is the seventh portal, at the centre, and it’s where every night in the book begins.
Acceptance
Welcoming what’s there, all of it, without first needing the story.
Shape of Emotion
Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey’s four-step method for the feeling itself: find it in the body, give it a shape, and work with that, without first needing the story behind it. I first learned to ask what shape a feeling is at my own dining table.
Wholeless
A word I made, for a way of living that didn’t have one. People hear it as wholeness, or as something missing, and it’s neither: -less as in boundless. One axis, two ends. The ends are not edges, and there’s nothing outside. I don’t live between mania and depression. I live in both, each in the other, and nothing has to be cut away for me to be me. It’s new, and the book is where it’s being worked out.
Natural Inclusion
A way of seeing I learned from Alan Rayner: each in the other, nothing with a hard edge. Not from a book. From letters: fourteen years with Alan, and the circle of companions around him that I found while I was at university, scientists, artists, writers, friends, who gather online and write to each other about love, healing, beauty and how nature actually works. Two hundred letters in the last five years alone, some of my purest writing. Roy and Larry have died; the circle keeps them. Whitehead and Hartshorne came by way of Adam Blatner, the only psychiatrist I met as a friend. The circle is where I think.
Raising awareness of how natural inclusion makes sense of our life experience, through art, science, writing and discussion, in the circle of writers I’ve belonged to for years. My essay →
Action
What I do with a feeling, every day, and how a day gets kept.
Five pillars
Emotional fitness is what you can do with a feeling, every day: your capacity to regulate how you feel. I learned it with Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey at 5th Place, and now I teach it. Thinking, because thoughts shape how you feel. Feeling, and welcoming all of them, without judgement. Moving, so body and mind stay together. Nourishing: food, sleep, creativity, care. Relating: people, and a community to belong to. Something to do with a feeling, every day: it’s the real essence of this story.
Six portals
A day can be told six ways: what happened, what’s ahead, what you made of it, a choice, what matters, what you felt. Presence is the seventh, at the centre. I call them P6, and I keep my own days through them. If I notice I’m all fictions, I ask myself for the facts. If I’m all outcomes, I ask what matters. Sundial, the app on my phone, is built on the portals, Shape of Emotion and the pillars: you talk, it keeps your day with you, and the dial follows the real sun.
A watch
Writing gets me through the night. The book is called Wholeless Nights, and every watch in it opens the way this page does: the hour, the body, what’s in the room. The Book →
Some words
If you’re new here, these are the words this house uses in its own way.
- Wholeless
- My word. Living in both ends of one axis, each in the other, with nothing cut away. -less as in boundless.
- The included middle
- A logic in which a thing can be this and that at once. The book’s subtitle, and how it holds mania and depression together.
- A watch
- A chapter of the book: one night’s writing, opening with the hour, the body and what’s in the room.
- Restorying
- Telling a memory again, and differently, so it survives. The belief under the book: we recover by restorying.
- The fifth place
- Home, work, community, cyberspace, and all of them together: being who we are. Also 5th Place, my friends’ practice, where I trained.
- Natural inclusion
- Alan Rayner’s way of seeing: nothing has a hard edge, and each thing is in the other, as a place is in me and I am in it.
- Presence in Action
- Dr Louie Gardiner’s practice: noticing facts, feelings, fictions and purpose, so that what happens next can change.
- Shape of Emotion
- Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey’s model, and their coming book: emotional fitness, something to do with a feeling, every day.
- LERO
- A lived experience recovery organisation: recovery run by the people who’ve lived it. I coordinate their development in North Northamptonshire, and belong to one.
- Presence
- The seventh portal, at the centre: the pause before anything is told.