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eBOOK

Because of the layout of the poems and photographs, we strongly recommend the printed book.

Find the Kindle version here
Imprint: Triarchy Press 
Published: 15th September 2015
76pp. ~ 12.7 x 20.3 cm ~ Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-909470-80-4
Price: £15.00

Tags: Fear, vulnerability, dramatherapy, Shakespeare's Tempest, poetry.

Read more:

The Author

Other Triarchy Titles you might love:
See our other titles in:
Fiction, Drama & Poetry
Movement & Somatics
Mythogeography & Walking
People in Society

Readership

 If you work with fear and trauma in others, or have ever experienced them yourself, Nothing Special will offer new approaches, ideas and insights for your personal, creative or professional practice.

The POETRY

Heedless

One bush in the hedge trembles
as chittering sparrows
begin to roost.
In the blue shadows,
moths dip, flit and flutter,
drawn dangerously upwards
towards the still-warm tree tops
where swallows –
confident gypsies of the sky –
are dancing.

Nothing Special 
Experiencing Fear and Vulnerability in Daily Life

Mary Booker


A remarkable collection of poetry, prose, photographs and personal experience on the experience of vulnerability.

Mary Booker is widely known and respected as a dramatherapist. But in Nothing Special she draws primarily on her own autobiographical writing, movement art, poetry, photography and a year-long Working Creatively with Fear project – as well as her dramatherapy skills and knowledge.

Mary explores the roots of vulnerability and fear in her own life, then uses four characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to unpick the different faces of fear that arise when we meet rejection, abandonment, oppression, alienation, objectification, chaos and a sense of being out-of-control.

She shows us how, with care, we can allow fear to become a gateway into vulnerability – and vulnerability can lead us into a deeper experience of joy, gratitude, aliveness and connection with self, others and the world around us.

 If you work with fear and trauma in others, or have ever experienced them yourself, Nothing Special will offer new approaches, ideas and insights for your personal, creative or professional practice.

The PHOTOGRAPHY

Picture
Thorn Tree by Mary Booker

The REFLECTION

"I am comfortable embodying and holding difficult emotions like anger, pain and grief – my own and others – and I can open to and express empathy and love.  But fear had been elusive.  I had investigated different ways of working with fear, both through catharsis and through metaphor.  Still it felt like I was not really going into it in any deep way.  

Both in the therapy space and the training space, I felt fear was not being addressed in the way that other emotions were.  Clients and students would shy away from it.  The fear of fear was powerful and difficult to move beyond – and I didn't know how to help them with it. 

When strong fear arose in myself, I experienced numbness and a kind of buzzing in the ears.  In trying to explore it, I felt myself come to an invisible wall of some kind.  Beyond this barrier the world lay, but I could not get to it.  I recognised this as a familiar experience, reaching right back into childhood as far as I could remember.  No effort on my part removed the barrier.  I would just have to wait until the feeling passed – and, even then, a sense of isolation remained and at times this has taken me into depression.  

I know now that what I experienced was dissociation, and while it was just ‘ordinary’ dissociation, rather than the result of severe abuse or trauma, it had profound consequences for how I experienced life.  I was over sixty now, and the need for greater connection was pressing hard.  Fear was in my way."

By the same author:   Touching the Flame