Today’s interview with artist, psychotherapist, and writer David J. Bookbinder couldn’t be better timed, because I had just read Kay Redfield Jamison’s introductory remarks to the Inaugural Arts and Psychiatry Series held by The Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center (where I, of course, was treated). Jamison, one of my very favorite authors (because she seems to combine explorations of the creative self with the study of psychiatry so effortlessly in her books), says this about the connection of art and science as in introduction to the first speaker in the series, poet Douglas Dunn:

Modern psychiatry can ease pain and relieve unnecessary suffering. But in order to maintain a fully human perspective on death and suffering, doctors and other healers must turn to the arts as well. This is one of the things that we hope to do with the Arts and Psychiatry Series—to reunite what doctors and healers can learn from the arts.

David Bookbinder is well equipped to do just that since he is both artist and healer. A fellow blogger for Beliefnet, David is a psychotherapist, photographer, digital artist, and writer living near Boston, Massachusetts. As a therapist, he works primarily with artists, children and families, trauma, and people with addictive behaviors (maybe I ought to move to Boston?). Like Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, David believes art can be a pathway to the essential Self and foster personal and global transformation.
1) David, you say that in the Flower Mandalas blog you hope to use art as a means to healing and transformation. I was snooping around in your Art, Healing, and Transformation group in the Beliefnet Community, and I read a few comments on the discussion thread “Re-finding My Creative Self.” A reader, Aquamarinegirl, asked how she might go about finding her creative self in a way that would give her life more meaning, or something like that (Sorry, Aquamarinegirl, if I got that wrong!).

In response, you suggested she might try the “Miracle Question” visualization exercise. You said you use this technique often with artist support groups, and it helps to inspire them. When I get to my next writer’s block, I’m on it, David! So, in this exercise you have a person visualize what her artistic self would be like if her current issues were no longer an issue. You prod the artist to answer these questions:

What will tomorrow be like if, when you wake up, all the problems and concerns you have about your creative self are gone? What will you notice, as you open your eyes, get ready in the morning, and throughout the day that lets you know, sign by sign, that a miracle has happened, and all these concerns are solved?

What kinds of results have you seen from this exercise? How does the guy who is stuck working at Blockbuster to pay the rent make the leap to writing his memoir (not that I have anyone in mind!!!!)?? I see the value of this exercise, but then there’s something called reality and I’m wondering how you get around that thing called reality….
The answer is that I don’t try to get around reality, I work with it.
The Miracle Question is not just a “What would you do if you won the lottery?” type of question. It is a way to envision how, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed, things are different when internally, externally, and contextually your life is the way you truly want it to be. The Miracle Question is based on the principle that we have the answers to our questions and can find our own solutions. We may need a little help, but they’re in there and can be found and actualized. It’s a way to envision, while awake but in a kind of self-induced light trance, what life will be like, in specific detail, when all our problems are solved. Some questions to ask yourself, after asking the Miracle Question:
How do I feel when I open my eyes?
Am I in the same bedroom? The same house? With the same people?
What’s different as I get ready for the day?
What’s different as I walk through it, hour by hour?
What do other people in my life notice about me that’s different?
What do I notice about them?
From the answers to these questions, a vision of life with all the problems solved is built. Most people do not imagine outrageous things. Aquamarinegirl, for instance, imagines that in her miracle she wants to write but she feels blocked. In her life, this blocked feeling has stopped her from writing or made her feel unsatisfied when she tries. In the miracle world, however, she realizes that what she needs is a writing coach and, with the help of that coach, in the miracle world she breaks through the block, does the writing she wants to do, and feels elated. She writes, in her later post, “I overcame my hopelessness about being able to put words to my experiences, partially through determination, and partially through the help and encouragement of a writing coach. After writing successfully, I felt a deep sense of release, and eagerness to share what I had written. My brief journey in the miracle world made me realize I wanted to write, what I wanted to write about, what I needed to succeed, and how I would feel if I did.”
The miracle becomes reality one doable step at a time. The first step is to imagine it, the next to see in what ways it is already a reality, and the last is to find small, doable steps that will move you to a place where the miracle, either literally or in its essence, has become your day-to-day reality. Perhaps all your Blockbuster guy can do right now is find fifteen minutes a day to begin his memoir, but if he does that for a week, he will have written for an hour and a half more than he had the previous week. And perhaps because he has started to write, he will feel a little closer to his miracle, close enough to think, “Maybe I need a job that pays better” or “Maybe I need a job that takes up less of my time.” And his next step toward the miracle might be to come up with a list of his skills and interests. Once he’s made that list, he’ll feel encouraged to start looking for that better job. And so on. Step by step, inch by inch, he moves forward, with the vision of the miracle he achieved when he asked himself the question (and, perhaps, was led through it by a sympathetic listener/questioner/coach) serving as a kind of North Star to guide him on his way.
This process has been extraordinarily successful, particularly with people who already live creative lives, or have the desire to. In a way it’s been too successful — I have trouble keeping my artist groups filled, because after a few sessions most people are off and running!
2) The piece that you sent me, “Reconceptions,” about your near-death experience, was fascinating. So many things I want to ask you about. But this first: for everything you gained in that experience — all your insight and wisdom and perspective (coming, readers!) — you say that you wouldn’t do it again if you had the power to bring on another one. Why?
My near-death experience was an amazing window into a realm of existence and of Self that I had never encountered, but it came at a great cost, both physically and emotionally. You have to be dying to have a near-death experience, and I have been left with numerous physical difficulties that are a daily struggle and, often, have achieved crisis proportions. Also, the experience is very strong and comes without the context of a spiritual practice or a supportive community that might help make sense of it. This is extraordinarily disorienting. It took me nearly a decade to feel that I had finally integrated everything that happened in those few minutes into my current self. Since my NDE, I have been able to achieve, through meditation retreats, experiences that are gentler but just as powerful, with no cost to my physical well-being and without the abrupt shock to my emotional system. This slower, gentler, and more persistent process is, for me, a better and more enduring way to a spiritual awakening. That’s why, if I could choose to do it again, I would not. It was necessary for me, at the time, in order to make the changes that have resulted in the person I am today, and I’m grateful for that, but it is a hard way to get there and not, I think, the only one.
3) For Beyond Blue readers, I think your near-death experience had the same effect on you as our depression or a mood disorder has had on us. I can’t speak for anyone, but you described these changes in yourself after the NDE:

* I no longer fear death itself. In near-death (and, by extrapolation, in death itself), I think you find the answer to the question you’ve most been looking for. Although mine wasn’t one of the blissful near-death experiences I have since read about, neither was it at all frightening; it was, rather, by far the calmest moment of my life, deeply centering.
* I am less attached to my physical form and to my past. It is as if the real “I” is a puppeteer manipulating this body, these patterns of behavior. Having survived a moment when everything I once had planned came abruptly to a halt, I find I am more interested in discovering what’s out beyond the boundaries of my current life, am willing to take more risks.
* My friends tell me I am somewhat more patient in little things, more tolerant than I was before of other people’s foibles and of my own. On the other hand, I tend not to cooperate in other people’s plans unless they fit into mine and am much more immune to guilt and shame.
* I spend more time writing and thinking and less time worrying about what it will amount to. I find it almost impossible to lie.

Therese, although I see your point — that you are one person while inside a depression and, in many senses, another when you’ve worked past it — the effects of a near-death experience are unlike those of depression, and the way of dealing with integrating an NDE into a sense of self is also very different. I know; I’ve also suffered from depression and have dealt with the before-and-afters of major bouts of it, as well. Though an NDE may be caused by an injury or disease and it may have disorienting effects somewhat like a mental illness, near-death is neither a mental illness nor a disease. It is a process we go through, I believe, when our minds become aware that we are dying. Something monumental happens then, and it happens very fast. A near-death experience can create a fundamental and almost instantaneous shift in personality and in perception of reality. It can provide both an energizing effect and, often, an unsustainable sense of being immune to the confines of conventionality.
What I think an NDE does have in common with getting “beyond blue” is that it is a second chance, a kind of rebirth. In the article you refer to, I used the title “Reconceptions” to describe the NDE because the experience was as if I had been reconceived and had to go through the process of infancy to adulthood all over again, this time somewhat differently. The opportunity to repeat these stages again allowed me to make different choices and, as Robert Frost put it, “That has made all the difference.” For me, the near-death experience was a turning point. It was the origin of my spiritual quest, rather than the outcome. It set me off on a journey and gave me a glimpse of where I would arrive. Fifteen years later, I’m still arriving!
Ten years ago, nearly everyone I met fairly quickly learned that I had had a near-death experience. Now, sometimes it comes up, sometimes it doesn’t. What has become much more important than what I learned from processing the NDE is how I’ve been able to act differently in the world. For me, the NDE was like the initiating action in the hero’s journey — the “inciting incident” in just about every action movie ever made. It plunged me headlong into another world without a guidebook and forced me to find a new way back into this one. In the typical hero’s journey (see my Flower Mandalas blog post on that topic), it is what happens after the initiating action — all the trials the hero goes through, including all the mistakes he makes — that enables him to bring back a boon to humanity he could never have gotten had he never gone on the journey.
A boon to humanity….?
Yes. In my case, that boon was the motivation and heart opening which helped me decide to become a healer, and the rediscovery — really, reinvention, because my previous work was so different — of myself as a photographer. These two things are, I think, my greatest gifts. My life has been a process of gradual discovery of my gifts, beginning with a talent for math and science when I was very young, then moving on to discovering I had one for writing and teaching, and finally arriving where I am now, which feels like a calling.
I was 41 and in the midst of getting a Ph.D. in English when I had the NDE, and that experience and the illnesses that followed began to point me in my current direction. I suspect, had this not happened to me, that I would be in an English department somewhere, creating online courses. Although I still enjoy teaching, in my day-to-day life now I’m affecting lives in ways that would never have been possible as a university professor. I have been able to reach people who have been through many counselors and have made no real changes, and under my care they have done remarkable things with their lives. Until you have been honored with that experience, you can have no idea how gratifying it is.
4) I’ve never had a near-death experience. But I stood on the edge of death for 18 months or longer. Standing beside death for so long, I think, is partly why many of my fears have subsided and I feel like I can finally be the real me, and post all of my embarrassing details on the Internet with little regret. I care (a little itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bit) less what others think of me. As an artist, is that how you feel too? Less blocked? Less self-conscious?

My whole relationship to being an artist has shifted since I found my calling as a healer. Now, instead of fretting about what others might think of what I create, I focus mainly on the force coming through me. Of course there is conscious effort in writing or photography or digital art, and I am constantly striving — whether as a therapist, a writer, or a visual artist — to improve my skills. And of course I am pleased when I am rewarded by the world in some way for my efforts, either with recognition or financially. But I don’t do what I do for those reasons. I do what I do, most often, to connect, either to some heretofore inaccessible part of myself, or to other beings on this planet, or to forces that feel larger than myself. My work with flower mandalas and, in a slightly different way, my work with seascapes, brings me to a sense of dialog with Nature, and that has a meditative, spiritual quality I hunger for when I am away from it too long and which, previously, I had never truly experienced.
5) I loved the part in your essay about your NDE when you describe the treasure. You write:

Coming upon the gifts of a near-death experience is a little like stumbling on a magnificent treasure in a mountain cave. You have traveled far and done perilous things to get there, and you have suffered much, but the trip was worth it. At first you are dazzled and enraptured by the treasure’s beauty and power, convinced that its glow will illuminate every portion of your being. You think it will sustain you forever. In a surprisingly little while, though, you begin to think about your past. At first it is irritating — bothersome calls keep coming in on the cellular phone from friends, family, the business associates who paid for this venture — but in the end, you find you also want to go back home. You wish you could take the treasure with you, but there is no way to get it off the mountain — there is a curse, or it’s too heavy, or it’s too well guarded. Whatever the reason, try as you might, you just can’t do it. So you take just one small jewel.

It seems to me that the small jewel is your ability to help people heal and transform through art, no?

That’s certainly a part of it. I should have died. My blood pressure, I was told later, went to 50/0, even though three units of blood were being pumped into me. And yet there I was, injured but still breathing, thinking, feeling, and with an energy I had not felt before. I needed to find out why I was still here and what was left for me to do.
At the time of the NDE, and in the several years thereafter, I believed that the small jewel was the sense of my innermost Self, the part of me that seemed to have existed before the me I’m usually aware of came into being and, by extrapolation, might continue in some form after this “me” is gone. But looking back on it now, I think that the jewel was actually a deeper connection to my compassionate, vulnerable self. It has taken me a long time to pull together the threads of who I was and to re-weave them into who I am becoming, but with each rewoven thread I feel more complete, and with each increase in my own sense of completeness I feel more able to provide compassion and help to others on a deep and abiding level.
The jewel I brought back was my heart, which, unbeknownst to me, had been partially hidden behind a shroud. Now, in my best moments, it shines.