A blessing can be defined as a special favour. It can be enacted in words whereby through one's choice of words towards another person one shows special favour or regard. A blessing can also be enacted through material gifts.

The basis of blessing, however, is within. The repetitive, conscious and willed choice to turn one's heart towards the practice of love is learning to find in oneself the place of blessing. This is the place from which one can authentically feel and intend blessings through good thoughts and words towards others.

In the Buddhist tradition this is practiced through the loving-kindness meditation, (see http://buddhist-meditation-techniques.com/loving-kindness-meditation/). In Christianity devotees are taught to "bless those who curse you" and in Judaism the practice of enacting "mitzvahs" is highly regarded.

Many of those who do enter into the work of practicing open-heartedness, mindfulness and compassion are used to taking the responsibility for these practices.

Sometimes the harder work is the practice of open-heartedness in the face of receiving enormous blessings.

What I am alluding to here is a certain kind of prideful mastery that can be experienced in the hearts of those who do practice the act of giving without expecting reward.

The aim in such giving is, of course, detachment. This means that by giving the giver tries to and aims to give in a way that one remains unattached to the outcome of acts. One aims to hand over to a greater power or design, the small gifts, mercies or blessings one extends daily in the trust that these will be found acceptable or worthy of contributing towards a larger plan. This is the aim.

Many who have been directed towards this kind of practice find a way to confront or overcome much earlier pain or losses. Often those who have been most wounded are the ones who most seek to heal. In this act of healing others there is the possibility of achieving self mastery but at the same time there is a potential for experiencing a kind of control that may have been missing at an earlier point in one's life.

In this sense it is always remains an essential blessing for those who bless to recall again the experience of receiving mercy or blessing from those who have needed one's blessings.

To be willing to be humble enough to receive such blessings is an opening of oneself over and over again.

Moreover for those who are practiced in bestowing blessing, when such become the recipients of enormous blessing, the challenge of being able to receive can be much greater than the act of giving.

In the receiving of such blessings one may be required to confront how much of one's giving was driven not simply by unconditional love, the place of blessing aimed for but, instead, by a secret shame-filled sense of unworthiness. In this way the open-hearted practice of receiving is essential for the authentic practice of blessing.

The capacity to make links between disparate parts, to see connections, patterns and thereby gain insights from the expanded view afforded by linking can be regarded as a valuable and meaningful skill. This capacity is generally associated with certain kinds of creativity. It is the kind of thinking that makes metaphor possible and poetry beautiful and it is the way of thinking that brings connection and meaning to many different levels of life.

The facility for connecting or linking is also a fundamental part of thinking. Being able to observe the world around us and then to link what we see to inner unseen states within ourselves or others is also the foundation of empathy and compassion.

In therapy it is often apparent that patients may have blocked or remained blind to some aspect of experience which requires another perspective in order to make the links or connections necessary in order for continued growth to occur. The skill of the therapist is often closely associated with the ability to make links between the various different parts of the material the patient brings.

In the case of individuals who have grown up in an environment where the relationship with the primary caregiver/s was/were fraught or unstable or uncertain, this capacity can be over-developed. The kind of early relationship seen in cases presenting with anxious attachment involves a caregiver who, although capable of nurturing, sensitivity and insight, is typically and perhaps even traumatically unpredictable in the delivery of these resources.

In such a situation the child moves towards the caregiver in the hopes of receiving nurturing. Over time, however, he or she learns to remain vigilant and on guard in every interaction. This vigilance is necessary in order to sense where in the spectrum of possible moods the caregiver may be at the present moment.

It is this state of perpetual vigilance that is associated with the development of excessive linking. The mind is continually scanning for potential danger; "Is that facial tic a sign of temper?", "Does that tiny hand gesture mean she is calm today?" etc. Every aspect presented is evaluated in order to gauge threat or safety.

This continual scrutiny is the child's effort to gain a sense of desperately needed security and safety or control in a situation that is experienced as unstable and uncontrollable and possibly, traumatic.

As this same child grows into adulthood this capacity can translate into a great sensitivity towards the moods and feelings of others. But without the added awareness of the individual's separateness from the moods and shifts in moods of those around one, this sensitivity can also translate into a miserable enmeshment where the now adult-child remains constantly tied into the ups and downs of the new individuals he or she is now closest too.

Often these adult-children will seek out relationships where this perpetual inner vigilance can be fitted appropriately to the relationship. This might be seen in the case of living with a partner with a difficult disease or a mood disorder. More likely is the situation in which the anxious adult becomes involved with an addict or an abusive partner. The anxiety, vigilance and scrutiny of childhood now becomes harnessed to current relationships in which the anxious linking has fertile ground to make connections.

What happens, however, when the partner in these relationships actually becomes well, or when the anxious adult becomes involved with a reasonable healthy adult partner?

Here, the capacity for over-linking becomes apparent and it becomes destructive to the functioning of this individual. The individual is still constantly scanning and evaluating for threat. The mind is trained to link events to threat but now, in reality there is no real threat apparent.

Still the mind persists in making links that in the past would have been linked to reasonable threat. Previously, for example, an abusive partner might have made eye contact with every waitress, flirted and exchanged numbers secretly. The sudden flicker of eye contact, the gesture of a hand exchanging the number, all these tiny movements were noted and recorded by the scanning anxious partner with good reason.

But now the anxious partner scans and notes the current partner making eye contact with a waitress. A link is made. This eye contact is linked with clandestine flirtation. The anxious partner is instantly triggered into a state of high arousal associated historically with a fundamental threat to safety. The body is flooded with hormones in response to the noted threat.

The individual "knows" with a sickening sense of certainty that what is "seen" is "true": the partner made eye contact with the waitress. However, what was once a link to clandestine behaviour is now simply what it appears; the eye contact is only that. What was, in the former context, a reasonable link in an unreasonable scenario, is now no longer valid.

Now the partner is exposed to a seemingly impossible situation. Everything that previously he or she relied on in order to gain a sense of mastery is no longer valid. The links generated by a mind constantly scanning the environment for the next threat in an effort to prevent further danger from arising now actually themselves become the source of difficulty.

The partner is accused of jealousy and paranoia and he or she is left in a state of indignant confusion; "but I saw what I saw."

In these situations the individual has to learn to break down the process of linking and furthermore, to be made aware of the fact of the potential for over-linking.

This can be a lifetime management project but often for patients who have been made aware of this reality simply the relief in recognizing the existence of this over-developed capacity can bring a shift that leads to change.

​Working with some of the most disadvantaged children in Johannesburg some years ago how often I was surprised to find in them such clarity and conviction regarding matters of right and wrong. How naive and prejudiced that attitude seems to me now. This uninformed expectation at the outset was based on the assumption that children who had been neglected, abandoned or abused, (many of them had grown up in child-headed households, household located in the midst of crime and gang violence with too many to count among them having themselves been the recipients of abuse and violence) would be unable to discern right from wrong. I presumed that their mindsets would correlate with the kind of exposure each of them had had to the world around them. 

Such clarity of vision, moral conviction and certainty was most crystallized in children of around 11 and 12, just at the outset of puberty. In this liminal space between childhood and "the other side", here, before hormones and other drives took over the trajectory of the mind and body, a clear-eyed, resolute vision was apparent.

My encounter with these children was with a lived and felt sense of what goodness was, an embodied and holistic awareness of what it felt like to be in the world, a felt appreciation for the overarching rightness of things and the wrongness of things.

The knowledge I encountered was an unmediated, simple, lived, embodied and articulated reality. It was one offered without doubt. It knew, for example, walking home along dark streets owned by particular gangs was not a good, that a father disappearing off with girlfriend leaving a child hungry behind was not a good, that the food provided for free at school in the mornings was a good, that the sickness and TB that had killed so many around them was not a good, that a traditional healer who threatened and manipulated the family to pay up for "cures" was not a good ... and so on.

These children were direct, articulate and doubtless in their knowledge they did not want to participate in the life of not-goodness, did not want to perpetuate what they had suffered and each of them in one way or another had resolved that they wished to follow and seek the places of goodness. They clearly knew in themselves the will not to drink, not to steal, not to cheat, not to become part of gangs, not participate in sexual violence and so on ...

Of these things and many others they were clear and certain and yet as I sat beside them it was also clear and certain that there was no clear way forward, no clear way they could obtain a meal that evening, or guaranteed safe passage home, nor was there certainty that they would sleep safely that night nor clear knowledge of their loved ones coming home.

There simply was no clear way to secure the good and meanwhile the pressures to participate in these other not-good paths pressed in on them daily, until - it seemed to me - it would become inevitable that their clarity would be lost and "life" would happen to them too.

The crisis of this liminal place; the where-to- next that this point in their lives confronted, was the knowledge I held that for most of them that the next step was not likely into a place that would reward the choices they wished to make and that most often the choices they made internally were not capable of being supported by the environments in which they found themselves and even more than this, that despite their very best will, almost all of them would fail.

One by one they would fail and one by one each would be forced to seek out the not-goodness as the next best thing to death.

It was crisis, a painful crisis of witnessing in which I was privy to an extraordinary reservoir of goodness and possibility. At the same time, I had to face my own lack of capacity to fully honour what I had encountered.

To see, to feel, to know at an authentic level the reality of this intrinsic goodness and to know that for the most part it is unlikely to be realized is not easy. To mitigate against the effects of this knowledge I guess you might say I sublimated, (I used a psychological defense to cover myself from the pain), I wrote a book that addressed this crisis. It asked the question: how could one child, even one child find his way through this valley of hopelessness towards an outcome where basic goodness might be realized and supported. The hero of this story was a composite of hundreds of those eager, clear-eyed and certain children I worked with.

In my heart I hold a place for the knowledge of the untapped potential of these children. These and tens of thousands like them are not to be pitied. Compassion is due yes, but pity is not a service to that spirit of resolute conviction. The pity that was due then and now, is to what is missed, to what remains after these spirits are snuffed out, finally abandoned to the only way left to stay alive. The pity is for our nation in the myriad instances in which it has and continues, in blindness, or even with both inept or impotent good intentions, to squander its own gold.