The Work this Week: Health Arises at the Pace of Nature

Enduring change does not usually happen suddenly. Slow and steady wins the race. Gradual change is more likely to be stable and lasting. Health arises at the pace of nature, not as a forced march but rather as a gradual organic process. In a balanced approach, there is less catharsis and more repeated body-centered awareness.

John Chitty

Ah, loves. This week we took it slow and laughed, and sometimes cried. We laughed because we are human, and things go slow, and I read several of you the quote above as a reminder. We talked about the spiral of growth: how growth doesn’t feel like going from point A to point B in a straight line, but rather in a spiral, touching on the same issues over and over again, a little different each time. And we hear from John Chitty that what matters most is not expressive catharsis, but repeated, body-centered awareness. The tedious, compassionate, loving, human work of going slow.

I am here to go slow with you, to cultivate humor about it, and to provide kind attention to all you are experiencing. I’m here to do that for myself, too. Sometimes, as my teacher Janet Evergreen says, the fastest way is to go slow. We are here to provide ease and humor and support for the experience of being human, of making mistakes, of being loved through them, and of finally learning to love ourselves. Welcome to the great work!

Go slow, little truck.

The Work this Week: Attunement

This week in session, a compelling theme for some of you was the concept of attunement. Sitting together, I watched your eyes soften, your hand go to your heart, and a quiet, full sadness come when you named that you did not always receive the attunement you needed as a child.

Attunement is an attachment concept. It’s the way a person feels another person’s experience and needs — even non-verbally, without being told — in order to meet those needs. Attunement is our ability to sense another human, to help them “feel felt”, as Dan Siegel puts it. It is an essential gesture of “being with” from one person to another, an accompaniment that helps us feel we can hold ourselves better because of how well they are holding us. Attunement from a caregiver, a partner, or a friend will often allow us to feel: “I matter. I am safe. This person will be there for me.” Attunement creates healthy attachment.

The funny thing is, when our caregivers lack attunement when we are children, we don’t always catch it or understand what’s happening. It’s easier as an adult — on a date, or in the therapy room, or at work — to get a sense that the person we are with may not be attuning to us well, and to take some space as a result. But as a child, we often don’t know what’s happening. We know that we feel bad, but we assume it’s because we haven’t done something right, and that love and attunement from our caregiver is coming, just around the corner, if we can get it right. Because we are dependent on our caregivers, we try to make it work, or pretend that it’s working, or become the caregiver ourselves so that things will feel better. We may carry with us both a sense that things are “off”, and also a sense that we have to fix it.

Lack of attunement from caregivers can be subtle. Lack of attunement can show up as someone talking too much, as a forced positivity that requires us to feel better, as constant worrying about how we are instead of hearing how we are. All of these things, though subtle, erase our experience instead of attuning to it, and require us to attune to the caregiver instead of the other way around.

This week, some of you were reckoning with the results of lack of attunement in childhood. All of us usually have some of this work to do, because even quite good parents will usually have large areas of lack of attunement. Certainly neglect and abuse is a big experience of lack of attunement. But whatever created it, it can be helpful to name: “oh, it matters when I don’t feel felt. It matters now that I choose people who can feel me and respond to me. It matters. I matter.” This is how we heal lack of attunement, by attuning to ourselves first, by recognizing how very difficult it was when we were children and didn’t feel felt. It can be quite lonely.

Here’s an invitation to slow down, to hear into whatever you are experiencing right now, to listen for the subtle undercurrent of your experience, and to make it matter. Let it blossom into something you can hold. You might find it helpful to place your hand on your heart, and actually rub your heart a bit. Here we are, little one. You matter. I’m here.

Resources: Sarah Peyton, Dan Siegel

The Work This Week

It has occurred to me so many times, as I wind my way through my week with all of you, that the work you all are doing reflects a similar theme as the week unfolds. Sometimes it’s more obvious than other times. I would like to begin to write it down here, sort of like a little rock cairn left along the way of our work together.

So, the work this week: so many of you were working on self-compassion. It showed itself in many sessions, some of you uncovering compassion for yourself unexpectedly, others consciously, and sometimes we unfolded it between us, like passing a small rock or gem back and forth. But it came up, over and over again.

Then on the weekend I listened to a talk by Tara Brach, and she spoke about how to remember self-compassion, and I thought again of all of us. I stood in my garden, pausing with myself and listening inside to the roil of the moment. I caught a subtle underlying fear, one I often don’t catch during the busy week, and when I got closer to it I could feel that the fear was from a sense of failure, as if I was behind and needing to catch up. As if I should push myself to be more, better, and if I came up short I should reject myself into accomplishment. This is familiar to me, but sometimes subtle, and hard for me to catch. As I listened to it further, I could feel the fear that I would abandon myself, that I myself would never let myself rest, that I would constantly push. The opposite of self-compassion. The push presents itself as self-improvement, but really is a form of violence.

I have been unfolding a several-year period of illness and recovery from illness, which has taught me about releasing my expectations of myself, simply because I am no longer capable of the things I used to be. What a gift to be given. In the process of facing my lack of capacity, I have uncovered old attachment wounds that told me I could only be worthwhile and lovable to others if I was impressive and skilled enough for them. I know I am not alone in this wound. As I worked to deconstruct these stories, which was terrifying (what? I can’t fix this by simply being good enough??), the possibility that arose in their place was this: that I could relate to others exactly as I am, and that I would find refuge in myself, acceptance in myself, even if what I had to offer was not enough for someone else. There has been arising recently, out of the great pain, a corollary great warmth and an increased gentleness. I am reliable to myself in new ways.

That’s as far as I’ve made it to date, and still I stand out in my garden and feel the push and the fear. And I think of all of you, and the beautiful work you are doing with self-compassion, and I think: I will join you. Thank you for showing the way.

Resources: Radical Acceptance (Tara Brach), Radical Compassion (Tara Brach), Your Resonant Self (Sarah Peyton), Self-Compassion Boot Camp, Myrna Martin

A nod to Thich Nhat Hanh

I had an emergency appendectomy this week! What an adventure. My friend sent me this below passage from Thich That Hanh on a morning after the surgery when I was feeling very poorly and she didn’t even know it. It was such a comfort, and I thought of all of you, all of us.

Dear one, I am here for you. Darling, I know you are there, and I am so happy. Dear one, I know you are suffering. That is why I am here for you. Dear one, I am suffering, too. Please help.

(Thich Nhat Hanh)

I have a picture on the wall of my office that is a Thai temple rubbing depicting one warrior carrying another. This quote reminds me of that picture, and why I have it on the wall. This is the work we are doing: carrying each other. When you come to my office, I am very aware that I am one warrior carrying another, that I have no special knowledge or capacity beyond your own, but that I am here to accompany you. And I am very aware that I am lowly and in need of help. We all make a big circle. Just wanting you to know.

Warmly,

April

A Poem for Emerging From Retreat

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.

Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

(Excerpted; by Kabir, a 15th century poet and mystic)

I am emerging from a 5 day meditation retreat with Shell Fischer of Mindful Shenandoah Valley. It is the first in-person retreat I have attended since Covid isolation began. I have been longing for it, and my meditation practice has suffered from not having in-person retreats. Five days was a good start, although not enough. As I heard Shell read this poem at the end of one of our sits, I thought of the hardships of the past years, for me and for my clients, and how I have been, in the face of my own hardship, hiding myself from my clients in order to survive. This is not like me. I have, in the past, widened my circle of awareness by bearing my own suffering well, and knowing it deeply enough that I could know others, and be a sturdy container of the vulnerability in us all. But these years, these Covid years, and for me cancer years, have not acted the same way in me, and I have changed my agreements with myself. Somehow, in this round of cancer, I have tried to hide my suffering, my exhaustion, my confusion, my loneliness.

Retreat reminded me of many things, but first to rise was this: I cannot hide any more. This is what I have to give. My exhaustion, my confusion, my ability to show up to myself without hiding. My ability to show up to you without you hiding yourself. The safety of my container. The truth of my own two feet. This is what I have to give to you. This is what you have to give to yourself. The ability to stand solidly in your own feet, knowing with intimacy your lived experience, and being willing to be vulnerable about it.

Meditation retreat is not easy: it involves 8 - 9 hours of meditation daily, and it involves noble silence, which means not only no speaking, but no eye contact, no reading, no writing, no music. Only the internal experience, attended to with rigor, with ancient practices of paying attention that, though difficult, expand your ability to be in your own life. As we are deeply with our moment-to-moment experience, we become more responsive, more flexible, more compassionate, more connected to all of life, with our sense-doors as the vessel of knowing.

I am committed to knowing together. Knowing that my suffering does not interrupt my ability to hold yours, but enhances it. As long as I know what’s happening to me. I am not extremely ill, and am taking good amounts of rest, and will be fine for now. But knowing what it’s like to be in a human body that can be harmed, that suffers harm, that bears unwellness, that can be lost — that is priceless, and informs my life. So I refresh my willingness to see that more clearly as I sit with you. And we will do that work together.

In the Interest of Supporting...

I recently found this piece that I wrote, briefly, when I was in the middle of a bodywork class and wanted to remember the essentials:

“In the interest of supporting contact and resource, neutrality, and appropriate, embodied response…

Keep contact with the issues.

Come from a place of sensing health, and sensing the work as the body’s and the system’s work, and you are supporting that. Don’t fall in, and don’t cut off. Remain connected to nature, to goodness, to resource. Remain connected to pain, to tenderness, to disturbance. Feel for the health at the center. Feel for the true neutrality that allows all experience, and returns to equilibrium. Even in the face of great pain, and never forgetting the truth of great joy. Act from appropriate boundary, distinguished by pain, and appropriate resource, distinguished by trust.

Find the flow, the pulsing that allows all experience to be felt and held. That is neutrality, that pulls on the strength of the system to allow resource, action, balance, and healing. Boundary belongs there, healing belongs there, action belongs there, joy belongs there. Connect with people who see it in you, who feel it in themselves. Act from it. Trust, engage, protect, act.

See clearly. There is always joy. There is often pain. Act. Rest. Trust. Choose. Be. Rest. Come from rest. Spring into appropriate response. Nourish. Always nourish, with every action. Choose deeply resourced, resilient actions.”

---

When I found this piece, I was a bit stunned. I looked it up online and in all my books and notes, to be sure that I wrote it, and then found evidence in my files that I had written it. I know these words and statements to be true, but I’m not always here. Bodywork brings me here. Healthy interpersonal process brings me here. Meditation brings me here and beyond. This place of interacting, the possibility of it and the felt reality of it, is why I am in the helping professions. I remember this sense filling the room one time when I was working with my own therapist, deep in contact with my own material and with her, and when the work felt done, the feeling of rest and fullness and joy filled the room, and her presence with me filled the room, and I looked up and said, “this is what being human is all for, right?” And she said, “Yes.”

So, yes to you, and to me, and to us, and to humanity. Yes to therapy, and healing, and joy. Yes to being human. Yes to pain, and resource, and boundary, and neutral grounded presence. Yes.