Don’t Speak!

Hearken back to the 1994 Woody Allen film Bullets Over Broadway, set in the glamorous world of 1920s films (cigarette holder and all).

Late-career leading lady Helen (played by Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar for this role) seduces the main character, a young playwright played by John Cusack.
 
Yet every time he tries to declare himself to her, Helen puts a halting finger to his lips and low-vibrates out the words, “Don’t … speak!” Here’s the scene. (Now, come back after, y’hear? There’s a reason I’m bringing it up.)
 
Helen’s proscription suggests words could only break the spell of the moment, even as needful as Cusack’s character, David, is of speaking.

Certain special words—“performative utterances”—actually have the power to accomplish something. If you’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, with the right intention, you can swear an oath. Or christen a ship. Or arrest someone.

 

 

Not speaking can be more powerful yet.

Think of the fierce gaze between expectant mother and father in the delivery room when the birth pangs are at their sharpest.
 
Or the glance of recognition across the aisle when you see the only other convulsed person movie theater who got the joke.
 
Or the silent holding of gaze and hands in the last moments of life.
 
It’s because not speaking is such a profound form of communicating and of knowing someone that in THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Conductor training, we teach you how to take support groups and families facing life challenges beyond words. Into the most powerful and memorable experiences of connection, support, and belonging.
 
We’d love for you to join us and make THE HUMAN JOURNEY® a regular tool you can offer those in your care. It’s not for every single group you work with. It’s for those families who don’t know what to say or how to start. For those for whom meaningful communication comes in many forms. For those who don’t yet know that they’re a family.
 
Join the growing group of THJ Authorized Conductors. We’ll be proud of the work you do.

The Embers of Love

Late in her life, my mother suddenly developed an interest in baseball. Yes, she rooted for the San Diego Padres, but what started to emerge was a substantial interest in the baseball players themselves.

“Isn’t he cute?” She gestured toward the TV screen. I hadn’t seen this coming.

“Cute as in you’d like to have him over for dinner, or cute as in you like l0oking at his backside?”

She merely smiled at me enigmatically, then turned her eyes back toward the TV.

When Marjorie died in 2005, I asked the funeral home to bury with her a pair of baseball earrings I had made for her — a baseball on one side, a bat on the other — so my love and hers (whatever her baseball obsession was really about) could travel with her.
 
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how we hold others’ values, desires, and wishes for them, how they become residues of their life in us and travel with us back into life.
 
On New Year’s Eve, a brilliant U.S. representative lost his son to suicide.
 
At first, there was only the announcement that the 25-year-old had died. Then, a few days later, Tommy Raskin’s parents put out a beautiful tribute, with photos that helped tell the story, to the person who was their son. It is an example of how to hold in gratitude even our most terrible losses. You will find it a meditation on love in action.
 
The Raskins acknowledged their son had suffered from depression but did not make that, nor a sensational mention of suicide, the main thing about him.
 
The tribute to the remarkable soul they clearly felt privileged to parent for 25 years does not attempt to own Tommy, simply to be grateful for him. It sidesteps any dominant cultural taboo and prurient interest in, or shame about, suicide while acknowledging that depression sometimes kills.

Less than a week later, Rep. Raskin was under siege in the U.S. Capitol, trauma upon grief, with his daughter and a son-in-law, who had wanted to hang close with him, separated from him by insurrectionists. He has said in interviews, while placing his hand over his heart, that he felt his son with him the entire time, and it’s easy to see he meant that in a most visceral way. Tommy was in Jamie’s heart.
 
Tommy was his father’s pride and joy, a young man who shared many qualities and interests with his father. For a lesser couple than Tommy’s parents, his values and loves would have been easier to carry forward in their actions had, perhaps, they coincided with their own. From observing, however, the beauty of their actions in the three weeks since Tommy’s death, I have little doubt that this couple would have brought Tommy with them back into life, however much his values might have differed from theirs.
 
For us mortals, it’s harder to hear – and, under duress, to respect — our loved ones’ values when they are opposed to our own.  It is a great act of love to hear and to respect them anyway.
 
One of the outcomes of THE HUMAN JOURNEY® experience Conductors readily observe is how the experience supports family members to hear their loved one’s experience, wishes, and values in their own voice, whether or not they coincide with their own.

In a situation in which what patients want at end of life is different from what family members wished they wanted, THJ® can help them enact their loved ones’ wishes, granting them the great blessing of carrying forward the felt sense of their loved ones with them, into life.

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Your Breath is a Testimony

“Your breath is a testimony,” tweeted Joél Leon, a Brooklyn-based poet a few days ago.
 
It’s one of those lines that hits, and hits deep. Especially when a lot is happening.
 
Just by living, by having a beating heart and a lifting breath, we are sacred witness at the same time to what goes on around us and to what happens within.
 
Our breath calls us to pay attention, to experience our aliveness. To not tune out because it’s too overwhelming or too painful or too confusing.

So what can we do, those of us who want to help others attend to their breath, to attend to the realities of their lives, if we hope to make paying attention more rewarding than tuning out?
 
For one, we can help them drop down and experience, rather than merely parrot, what is so much more than a truism — that what we tell ourselves about what is happening is an entirely different thing from what is actually happening.

  • What our five-year-old says happened between him and the other kids today at school may be the way he sees it, but we know it’s not what took place.
  • The causes of the life-threatening conditions so many have been facing in Texas may not be, right now, what they appear to be or than we can facilely say they are.
  • The automobile accident that takes two lives and causes untold pain to friends and family — likely for generations – feels “tragic.” Yet our calling it so may actually get in the way of our acting to improve the conditions that may have contributed to the accident. The very “story” may get in the way.

As we breathe, we offer witness to our being in time and we acknowledge our footing on a planet that also exists in time. We get clear of obfuscating tales about what is happening and move more directly into what is happening. We make contact with reality as fully as we can.
 
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Turning Listening on its Ear

With THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience, we try to make listening easier.

To things that one family member saw one way, and another … well, another way. To beliefs and values that are different … but worthy of respect. To unspeakables.

Our process teaches that kinda through the back door. And, indeed, we were inspired to work on this as a design problem largely because of having been in “the “good listener” (which can sometimes be code for “frustrated listener”) position … for years.
 
But, short of learning to conduct the THJ® process for others, there’s a lot you can do, one on one, in your own life, especially as you’re listening in challenging circumstances.
 
You know when you’re stuck. They’re telling a story they’ve told before, a thousand times. It’s painful, and they’ve got how they tell it down. Now you’re the one who’s listening to it. It’s like the story got stuck in Times Roman, with an occasional drop shadow.
 
The thing is, they’re stuck, too. Most of us haven’t realized there’s more than one font to set a story in — more than one genre in which that story can fit. We’ve only learned to tell it one way.
 
And then the gifts in that story get clogged up in there, too.
 
You can help them shift the story, bring in Optima or Constantia or Futura. Or at least get them started with Century Schoolbook.

You’d do it gently, with the same simple strategy we share when teaching “story-catching” (a fancy name for interviewing). You ask a question.

One that asks them to re-see the world as it was at that moment, not as they see it now. You find a place to ask to take a pause so you can reflect on what they’ve said, and then you offer a question—something that you sincerely, and out of love, want to know — and you may break them out of crusty narrator mode, and re-settle them in a fresh view.

  • “Can I ask you to give me a second? I want to just sit with what you’ve just shared.” You wait and you genuinely dig down for the question that’s about what it was like for them at the time of the original story. Ideally (but it takes practice), the question will invite not a yes or no answer, but one that evokes the sights, smells, and perceptions of that time.

 

  • “Do you think he was aware that you were in the room, singing to him?” (Not bad — it’s yes/no, and it asks about someone else, not the storyteller, but it’s going to lead to a descriptive answer anyway about what his face looked like, what the signs were, how they were positioned in the room, and other things you can follow up on.)
  • “What do you think you were successful in communicating to her?” (Depending on the context, could be good — it asks for a descriptive answer, and also draws the person toward an owning of their inner life at the key moment.)
  • “For you, what’s the most memorable word or sound or thing you saw that seems to encapsulate the whole thing, or that’s strongest for you?” (Again, depending on the context, could be good: it drops the person down into the world of the original story and moves a bit beyond extraneous language to the power of the moment.)

The sincere desire to make listening an act of gently offering a re-formatting of a story — as long as it is presented as a desire to understand, not to judge, control, or change — can unlock what’s in there, once it’s freed from genre. Or font.

That’s one way to make of listening a gift.

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Which part of the groove you want them in

If you haven’t seen this video making the rounds already, I think you’d be glad you did. It’s of ballerina Marta C. González, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.

(Rather than stay suspended in blissful reverie afterward, though, please come on back.)

 

 

 

(Ok, thanks.) Shot in 2019, this video has been getting wide airplay this week, and Alistair Macaulay, renowned former dance critic of the New York Times, has been digging into it. 

So I’m going to de-romanticize, but I promise a payoff. The video is actually a bit different from what it appears to be.

The young ballerina in it turns out to be a different dancer, Yuliana Lopatkina. 

On top of that, the ballet Lopatkina dances is not Swan Lake, but rather The Dying Swan. 

Even so, so much is clear to see from from watching Sra. González respond to Tchaikovsky as she does in the video.

If you are a therapist or a specialist in aging, you might see the known power of music to draw people with Alzheimer’s into expressiveness, to reduce agitation, to strengthen memories and language abilities, and to improve physiology. 

If you are an artist, you see an affirmation of the ennobling might of music and dance. You see the curvature of Sra. González’s refined hands, the exaltation in her chest, her clear sense of the proper way this movement had to be executed to be done right. The woman’s high standards are evident. 

As human beings, we see someone (whom otherwise we might have thought of as having lost what made her most essentially her) as a woman who has a thing to accomplish and a very specific way of doing it. It is that way, rather than the what, that captivates me. 

The music suggests to her something that must be done with a particular turn of the shoulder, inflection of the torso, and direction of attention — each of those things and no other. Her way is what we learn from her.

Indian teaching has a concept of something called samskaras, mental habits or “grooves” that we are more likely to fall into because we have been there before. We keep taking the wrong way home from a place we don’t go to often because we took that wrong left the last time, too. We reach for the chocolate at 3:00 p.m. because that’s what’s given us a jolt out of the funk (even if momentarily) before. 

And we see ourselves and our stories in fixed ways because we learn the genres, the choreography, early on.

Yet the happenings of our lives can be framed in infinite ways. 

Our job in life, if you’re interested in samskaras, is to soften our tendency to become slavish to these tendencies, to give ourselves choice rather than automaticity.

One of the things I always say now when training new Conductors of THE HUMAN JOURNEY® in helping families through life challenges is that this game-based process is designed to help people “hold their own stories a little more lightly, and others’ stories a little more tenderly.” In other words, to soften the grooves that may prevent one humanity’s touching another. 

How are people, in the midst of grief or sorrow or alienation, supposed to do that? By keeping the grooves that matter and softening the ones that don’t.

Much as we desperately want to romanticize the historical footage actually being of her, dancing the same choreography she’s showing us now, and of that choreography actually being Swan Lake, she’s not actually dancing the “real” Swan Lake. Indeed, despite the beautiful score, either one of them is doing actual Swan Lake choreography in this case. 

Yet, as an older woman, with the soundtrack in her ears, she is transcendently beautiful in what she’s doing.

Sra. González dances from her heart and with the exquisite technique she’s learned from years of training and love invested in her art form. She’s able applied what she knows in her bones to create a new dance, a new construction of the pieces of her experience, keeping the grooves that matter and softening the ones that don’t.

Join us to learn to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY®. 

How to be hospitable without guests

That’s what’s been on my mind since we’ve been quarantining.

The front door isn’t exactly open. But recently I’ve noticed something different in the public sphere, and it’s made me think about a broader form of hospitality.
 
Many more public figures I follow on social media are offering well wishes as the sacred holidays of others come up – in the terms that those groups would use for themselves, rather than as awkward outsiders.
 
A state governor, with almost 200,000 Twitter followers, wished “Eid Mubarak!” in late July in honor of the Muslims he serves. He is Jewish.
 
Another public official, who is Christian, included his millions of followers in offering “blessings of light, goodness, and prosperity” on the dawn of the Hindu holiday Diwali, which celebrates the triumph of light over darkness. (You may note the similarity in the celebration of light with holidays in other traditions.)
 
A former public official, now a popular pundit, made light play of Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday, in a way that expressed affection for its traditions. His parents are Sikh and Hindu.

Even as more and more of us claim multiple cultures as our own, many of us too were raised in families that celebrated specific holidays, not some sort of generic or multiple “happy holidays.” And all it takes to call members of a culture by the names they would give themselves, and the general shape their religious or cultural lives take, is a few minutes on Google.
 
Indeed, even though we may sometimes get it wrong, we stand to learn some of the most important things about the other person we possibly could. 
 
With culturally appropriate wishes that refrain from otherizing those you encounter, and in much less time than it takes to clean the house and prepare a spread for 20 of your closest friends—you’ve laid out the red carpet for others and made the world a safer and more welcoming place to be human – in the so-particular way in which each of us is.

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Who wants to be self-righteous?

One of the (gulp) many books I’ve wished I’d written myself is a little book of thought experiments called Astonish Yourself! by Roger-Pol Droit, whose playful activities expand our perception beyond the habitual.
 
In a period in which many of us are all too familiar with the four walls around us and maybe could use a little jostling of our perceptions, I thought you might enjoy playing, too, with a new thought experiment I sprang on the participants during a half-day PD workshop I just conducted for the National Association of Social Workers in Wisconsin. 

For this activity, you’ll need a pen and an index card or a stiff piece of paper.

First, put into a sentence the single spiritual belief you hold that for you is the most unshakeable.

Take an index card or stiff piece of paper, and fold it in half to make a table tent. write that belief above the fold, and then set up the table tent right in front of you. That belief you wrote should then appear upside down.

Next, you’ll read out loud, one at a time, a few of the beliefs listed below, each of which may be held by someone. You’ll read one, glance at your table tent, close your eyes, and just notice:

  • Does entertaining that belief cause your throat to tighten?
  • Does the ticker tape of your mind flash with, “Well, that’s just absurd!”?
  • Or do you have a moment of curiosity, something like, “I wonder whether you can believe that and also what I believe at the same time”?
  • Or perhaps of dizzying confusion?

Do this process with as many of the beliefs on the list below as you like.

The List

  1. It doesn’t matter whether you talk about one supreme God or multiple personal gods or goddesses; they’re the same thing.
  2. Suffering is there to teach us something.
  3. God has a physical form.
  4. My religion’s practices are preferred over conventional medicine.
  5. Men’s and women’s roles are divinely ordained to be different.
  6. We do good things just because they make us feel good. Nobody’s going to reward us for them.
  7. The chief thing wrong with us, and that leads to the wrong we do to each other, is ignorance.
  8. God takes deep interest in human affairs.
  9. Only natural forces, like evolution, are responsible for life on earth as we know it.
  10. There are no, and never have been any, incarnations of God.
  11. God ordains that women be modest.
  12. There is no true spirituality outside of a religious or spiritual community.
  13. Illness is caused by witchcraft.
  14. We owe a Supreme Power our worship.
  15. War is never spiritually or religiously justifiable.
  16. I revere nature as a central aspect of my belief system.
  17. All people pray to the same God, whether or not they use the same name for that God.
  18. As long as the men in my family are praying, the whole family is good.
  19. There is nothing after life on earth.
  20. Human beings have sinfulness in their nature.
  21. If the government leaves them alone, most businesses will do what is right.
  22. My social class is divinely ordained.
  23. Being sick is a particular opportunity for me to repent.
  24. Humankind will be saved by our own efforts, not by the intercession of a Supreme Being or by religious practices.
  25. The only thing I can improve is myself.
  26. My ancestors give me strength.
  27. If I didn’t read the Bible, it wouldn’t matter.
  28. The purpose of life is to earn as much as possible, so you can make the most of life.
  29. If a belief is proven by science, then it’s true.
  30. The world is purposely flawed, and it’s our job to help repair it.
  31. I pray for miracles.
  32. Mission work is an essential part of being a good member of my faith.
  33. We suffer because the cosmos is out of balance.
  34. You get what you deserve: if you do good, you get good; if you do bad, that’s what you get
  35. My belief system requires that I be engaged in the betterment of others’ conditions.
  36. What is right or wrong depends on what you believe.
  37. When people do evil things, they are punished in the afterlife.
  38. There is no such thing as a personal God, only an impersonal reality that does not care about what happens to us.
  39. You can be a member of your religious or spiritual tradition without doing any practices or rituals whatsoever.
  40. If I suffer, there must be a reason.
  41. I’ll be reincarnated because I clearly haven’t learned everything I need to yet.
  42. God loves us, whether or not we believe in God.

Debrief

Finally, notice any patterns in the reactions you had. Did you discover types of beliefs that are particularly threatening or, alternatively, affirming, or even exciting?

In the NASW workshop, we took a fourth, and, for the time being, final, step. We spent a few minutes looking at the beliefs we hold about our beliefs. This is where the real “action” may lie in terms of how we may discriminate against others’ world views (spiritually, politically, or otherwise). We may believe, for example

  • What I believe is the true way.  
  • My way of believing is the best way.  
  • Other people would sure be happier or better off if they believed the way I do.  
  • People who believe other than the way I do are underdeveloped or sadly deluded.  
  • People who have not adopted the vows I have taken are less likely to be happy or successful than I am. 
  • People who are part of my group have “got it” or are chosen.  
  • Religion has been responsible for so many deaths in history that I choose not to believe.

 How many of us had burning cheeks by the end? Possibly only those who in the moment recognized themselves. Thankfully, many of the people in the NASW workshop saw themselves in this reflection.

And two of those burning cheeks were mine.

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Sara K Schneider

Grief on the Comedy Stage

Is it in supremely bad taste, or potentially healing in a social setting, to use death and dying as material on the American comedy stage? The post-pandemic fad of comedy shows that deal with what have been taboo topics is currently walking that line.

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Anxiety explained visually by illustrator-social worker Lindsay Braman.
Activities & Tools
Sara K Schneider

If You’re a Pro, You Gotta Have a Pro

Lindsay Braman’s example can open your mind about what sorts of both joy and utility you can create, simply by letting your own gifts out of the closet and using them in your work, in recognizing that, if a therapist/doodler can connect two passions, so can you.

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