I am also intrigued by how we as therapists keep ourselves in good shape psychically so that our conversations with people are full of optimism and hope, rather than cynicism and despair. The psychic space we occupy is undoubtedly fundamental in terms of our contribution to the conversations we have with clients and yet this is not an issue which, in my experience, is discussed much by therapists. 

Exposure to heroes as role models and what that does for me is fundamental to how I look after myself and prevent myself from running on empty. If your work is all about giving out, you need to ensure that you are simultaneously being filled up. Much of this comes from the reciprocity of the exchange with clients, but there are times when I feel drained, especially when I am the witness to someone’s distress and that is the only thing they want from me. At those times I find it very helpful to reflect on some of the wisdom and experiences gleaned from the heroes with whom I have had contact. In this way I am reminded of the heroism in myself and in the people with whom I work. 

Nelson Mandela and Reuben Carter were invited to Melbourne for the recent Reconciliation Day Celebration at Colonial stadium. Therein lies a very pertinent story. A schoolboy, researching his paper on Nelson Mandela as part of a segment on outstanding figures of the Twentieth Century, decided to write to his hero and ask him to Melbourne. To his amazement, Mr. Mandela agreed and the celebration (with an audience of 20,000) was born. If that schoolboy had not had the courage to ask - to operate from his own heroism - a wonderful evening might never have happened, and thousands of dollars would not have been raised for the Nelson Mandela Children’s  Fund.

Nelson Mandela’s story is very familiar – 27 years in gaol, release to head the African National Congress and leader in the dismantling of Apartheid. It felt fantastic to be part of an enthusiastic audience that gave him a lengthy standing ovation. The positive energy was palpable. So much that he said was inspiring, but the highlight for me was towards the end of his talk when he discarded his notes and spoke straight from the heart about the courage and heroism of ordinary people, about how we can make an impact and how important it is for all of us to take a stand,

Also I particularly enjoyed his playfulness with the children on stage. To have experienced so much pain and injustice and emerge as he has in such fine shape is amazing. I was reminded of a newspaper article I read some months ago about a woman sculptor in her 80s, who said that when she was younger her sculptures were heavy like her heart, but they have become lighter, whimsical, ephemeral as she has aged. She suggested that at a certain point in life earlier angsts tend to drop away and you are happy just to be alive. That was the sense I got from Nelson Mandela. 

Reuben Carter was not a familiar name to me. However, he seemed very well known to the majority of the audience, particularly the young. This is possibly because a film based on his life, starring Denzel Washington, had recently been released. In fact, he joked that since the film came out several people had come up to him in the street and told him he is not as good looking in the flesh!

Reuben Carter was apparently a famous boxer in the United States, living a flamboyant superstar life style, with his name even emblazoned in silver on the side of his convertible. But at the peak on his career he was charged with the racist murder of three white men. In the New Jersey court the judge, jury and lawyers were all white. The only blacks were Reuben Carter and his loved ones. He was found guilty and spent 20 years in prison, half of which was in solitary confinement, before the original judgment was overturned and he was released. 

Reuben Carter had the compelling presence of a deep Southern preacher and utilised his powerful oratorial skills to such effect that it was difficult not to believe his recurring refrain:  ‘There are changes afoot’. He described how in the darkness of solitary confinement, when it was impossible to see his skin colour, he finally appreciated that there was no such thing as race – “only the human race”. Like Nelson Mandela, Reuben Carter’s years of incarceration were a long dark night of the soul. But instead of becoming bitter and vengeful about the miscarriage of justice, they both emerged as wise, warm, funny and optimistic about the human race. 

Maude Barlow, the eminent Canadian environmental activist, said in Melbourne in June that if ever we had the chance to hear Vandana Shiva talk, we should walk over hot coals to do so. So I was delighted to see that RMIT School of Social Science and Planning and the Stegley Foundation were co-hosting ‘the Seedkeeper of India’ as the keynote speaker at a conference on global capitalism. So Susie Costello, my fellow seeker and I, didn’t even have to burn our feet to hear her. This conference on10 September was obviously timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum at which she was also speaking. 

Vandana Shiva, physicist, philosopher and feminist, is Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Ecology and Technology in New Delhi. Twenty years ago she decided to commit ten years of her life to environmental activism and is still at it. In the process she became the founder of Ecofeminism – more about that later. She has written 13 books and is described by the Observer newspaper as ‘A Green International Star’. She is said to be one of the 50 key environmental thinkers of the last 2000 years. 

Vandana Shiva is round, with beautiful skin, dressed in traditional sari and has the lovely languorous walk of so many Indian women. She is a wonderful speaker, impassioned, amazingly well informed, straight shooting, but with a gentleness to her as well. I want to spend some time talking about Vandana Shiva because I feel that there is much we, as people and as therapists. can learn from the Indian experience. Also, I was fascinated by her insights, many of which were absolute news to me. 

This was the first time I had ever heard anybody from the third world talk in detail about the impact of economic globalisation on the daily lives of ordinary people and it blew my mind. Two examples will have to suffice for now. She spoke about the high rate of suicide among farmers saddled with debt from paying the multinationals for their seeds, herbicides and pesticides. These suicides tend to occur not in the first, but the second year of overwhelming debt. Why? Because in the first year they can sell a kidney to survive! In a similar vein, because 70% of world trade in food is now controlled by the multinationals, it is easy for these corporations to undercut local producers because they can wait 10 years to take a profit. At the moment, for instance, what is being called the Second Boston Tea Party is happening in India, as the 25,000 tea producers of Assam burn their tea daily because cheap imported tea has totally undermined the local market. 

Vandana Shiva outlined how economic globalisation had its origins in the third world centuries ago in colonialism. Having heard her speak and read some of her books I realise now how many misconceptions I have had about the benefits the affluent countries have brought to poor third world countries and how pervasive a colonising mentality can be. In fact, Vandana Shiva made the point most eloquently that in pre colonial days and even until recent years in many cases Indian villagers had a good life. India was a nation of small subsistence farmers, who typically lived in a harmonious relationship with their environment. Farms were essentially self sufficient, with a mix of crops and livestock, which assisted with soil fertility and pest resistance. Forests were seen as a precious resource, from which organic fertilisers for crops, fodder for animals and roots, nuts and plants to supplement the human diet could be collected. In times of scarcity access to the ever present, self-replenishing forests frequently meant the difference between life and death. People had a rich culture and a mystical and religious system in which they saw themselves as part of nature, protective of it and grateful for its bounty. 

A different ethos prevailed, however, in the West, dominated as it was and is by a science which has never been value free, and which reflects the stance of a powerful elite of middle class men whose ideas gained ascendancy from the sixteenth century onwards. A chilling example of the way that big science has been utilised has recently come to light. There is evidence that Africa was used as an experimental research laboratory in the late 1950s, when an American virologist gave live oral polio vaccine to hundreds of thousands of Africans before it was licensed, so that the West may have inadvertently been responsible for the AIDS pandemic. The suggestion is that some of the batches of vaccine could have been contaminated with the AIDS virus naturally carried by the chimps, whose tissue culture was used in vaccine production.

In the West there had always been other knowledges and belief systems available, for example the traditional healing arts, including midwifery, which were typically the province of women. But when Western science was elevated to the status of the ‘Truth’ it followed that its rules had to be obeyed and that a narrow definition of progress became the natural order. One important rule is about productiveness, namely that the objective of farming is to produce goods that can be sold for profit. In this schema, subsistence farming is invisible or valueless. Hence it became easy to see third world farmers as living in poverty because they produced no surplus for sale. 

Western science provided support for an attitude in which it was man’s role to control, to manage and to harness nature. All of these highly mechanised terms reflect the view that man is apart from and superior to nature. From this perspective it made absolute sense for the British to cut down Indian trees for masts regardless of the horrendous impact on the local ecological balance. In contrast, Vandana Shiva suggests that the promotion of that alternative knowledge, which has always been embraced particularly by women and indigenous peoples and leads to a delicate balance between human kind and nature, provides the way forward.  This wisdom is at the root of present day Ecofeminism. 

Earlier this year, the Living Democracy movement was launched in the Himalayan region of India. This movement is committed to a consideration of the larger family that inhabits the world with humans, namely animals and plants. Thousands of people in that region have determined that from now on the resources of the villages belong to the villagers and will be used by them sustainably to ensure that every last person in the village benefits. 

This Living Democracy movement suggests a return to community as one positive response to the problems that beset modern India because of economic globalisation. Perhaps this movement sounds too Utopian and inapplicable to the West, but it seems to me to be full of possibilities. In fact, in many instances I feel that a return to community is happening in creative, adaptive ways in the West already. 

It will not be as easy to return to smaller geographic units, especially in urban centres, but there is a burgeoning interest in local community concerns and action. Recently in my street there were numerous formal and informal neighbourhood meetings to decide which street trees we wanted planted. And as I write, a round-the-clock picket line goes on in my suburb outside the Gentle Bunyip, a house of great historical interest that has been targeted for redevelopment. 

Patch Adams is somebody for whom I have enormous admiration, the real Patch, not his cinematic incarnation as Robyn Williams. Patch has spent a lifetime promoting the efficacy of humour in healing. He talks about how the biggest mental health problem in the West currently is loneliness. Think of your present caseload, how many people would you say you are seeing whose primary problem is loneliness, in one or other of its guises? I can count quite a few in mine. Certainly a return to smaller units of connectedness makes sense for this reason alone.

Perhaps, however, Westerners will develop a sense of community not so much through geographical proximity, but rather through affiliation. For example, the very loose community of organic shoppers in Europe, which is currently running at 40- 50%, is having an astonishing and positive impact on agricultural practices there. Similarly, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which groups of investors finance farmers to grow organic crops for them, is one way of reconnecting non-farmers with the origins and hazards of the farming experience. The investors often help to harvest and take financial losses in the same way that the farmers do. CSAs are becoming more common overseas and there is even an interest group starting here in Melbourne. 

I am amazed at the number of popular movements and protests that are beginning to be reported in the media, evidence of citizens taking action and acting from their own heroism. In the last week, for example, there was a very positive report on the dapper green activists, Grass Roots in Suits, who are presently targeting a major hardware chain, who are dominant in Western Australia’s old growth logging industry. On the international scene, there have been press reports of protests across the United States, where Students Against Sweatshops are taking a stand against the sweatshop conditions under which clothing bearing the University logos are made. I am inclined to agree with Reuben Carter that there seem to be changes afoot. 

Hearing Maude Barlow in June has revolutionised my thinking such that I have been on a roll ever since. It seems to me that often the most heroic act is exercising the choice to think for yourself and act accordingly, and not be constrained by the possible consequences. All of the people I admire seem to have that ability and it is something I want to develop in myself. To use narrative terminology, it is often about the capacity to resist accepting the dominant story about yourself as the only truth and to embrace the implications of living life from alternative positions. To the world I might look like a middle class, middle aged denizen of the city, but in my heart I know I am also an eco-warrior. 

Heroism is important for us as therapists I believe because the people we see also have the same capacities - that desire and ability to act from the best, bravest part of themselves, but like us they have often lost the confidence to believe that of themselves. It seems to me that our role as therapists often involves us in being able to believe that of them in advance of them believing it of themselves. Exposure to heroes, with their reminder of the human ability to operate at full throttle, to demonstrate compassion, generosity, forgiveness, humour and playfulness, despite failures and unjust treatment, assists me to maintain my optimism about clients’ capacities to make changes - which frequently turn out to be much greater or more creative than any I would ever have predicted for them.

Heroes are influential because they remind us of the power of the individual to make a difference. One of the heartening aspects of the recent protests against the World Economic Forum was that some of the speakers inside the Casino admitted that their views did not differ significantly from some of the speakers outside. Even Bill Gates, who is obscenely rich and heads one of the most powerful of the multinationals, has started a philanthropic trust which is currently spending billions of dollars on world health. We can only hope he listens to the local people’s wisdom about where and in what ways the money can best be spent. 

Heroes provide a counterbalance to the prevailing story of mankind’s destructiveness, rapaciousness and exploitation of others, examples of which always grab the headlines. The belief that there is only one view of humanity -and a negative, pessimistic one at that - fosters selfishness, passivity and increased power for those operating with ruthlessness and greed, because if you feel impotent you are unlikely to take a stand. Despondent people are more tractable.

By emphasising this notion of heroes I am not wanting to promote just another brand of elitism. After all, the majority of heroes have always gone unsung. As Vandana Shiva emphasised in the successful campaigns against logging in India the people who had a high profile were only the tip of a large iceberg. Local people were working away, relentlessly and anonymously, to achieve that result. So the importance is not in the public perception of heroes or heroics, but about what it does for us personally and psychically to truly appreciate that we too have that capacity. I think people respond so passionately to heroes because at an intuitive and even at a visceral level (the hairs on the back of my neck were absolutely standing to attention when I was listening to Nelson Mandela) we know that individuals can prevail and make a huge difference in the world. 

I am grateful for John Howard’s comments at the World Economic Forum when he compared economic globalisation to the Olympics. He meant to suggest that good competition leads to enhanced performance. I feel that it is a particularly apt comparison for somewhat different reasons. The dubious financial management practices, the difference in team sizes, the different levels of financial and other support and preparedness to utilise illegal aides to enhance performance and success demonstrate that there is definitely no level playing field. The comparison is also particularly pertinent because the Olympics is essentially an event staged by man which, like economic globalisation, is not a force of nature or a natural phenomenon and therefore its momentum can be reversed or stopped. 

I am not, however, opposed to the Olympics per se. There are many genuine stories of Olympic heroism. A few years ago at the Seattle Special Olympics, nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race to the finish and win. Shortly after the start one boy stumbled, tumbled to the asphalt and began to cry. The others heard the boy cry, slowed down and hesitated. Then, they all stopped, turned around and went back - every one of them. One girl with Down’s Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, “This will make it better.” Then all nine linked arms and walked together to the finish line. The cheering in the stadium went on for 10 minutes. People who were there are still telling the story. 

This has been a Cook’s Tour of some of the heroes who people my imagination and who assist me to keep in shape psychically. It would be an interesting line of questioning to pursue with clients and ourselves - namely: 

Who do you most admire?
 Who do you have most affinity with and why?
 Who are you most like?
 Who would you like to be most like?

Obviously this exploration could include heroes from the past and the present day and could well profit from research that could have therapeutic benefits in itself. I am certainly not suggesting we proselytise, but inevitably our questions emerge from our experiences, and the more these are potent, diverse and positive the better we are positioned to be of assistance to others.
 

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