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.
