March 2021 - THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

March 12, 2021

Where can you walk and walk and yet not get anywhere?

Labyrinths give insight and perspective.

You follow a path that may have lots of crooks along the way but which has no tricks, only the trek

Labyrinths render concrete that experience of surrendering yourself to the possibility of re-seeing. They are willingness embodied in earth architecture.
You start, at the mouth of the labyrinth, recognizing there’s something unfinished in you.
Eventually you get to the center. You wait. And then, armed with something, you return, re-tracing the way you came. There is no other way out.

Unlike a maze, the labyrinth isn’t designed to fool or frustrate you, only to keep you moving and to show you when to be still.

And retracing your steps, eventually you’re out.

Same path, different you.

It’s what an old teacher of mine used to call “repetition with a difference.”

In THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, our game board is a stylized tabletop labyrinth that integrates with the card pattern and our proprietary group facilitation method. (We call it “Conducting.”)

The THJ® Labyrinth Board gives participants another way of seeing the map of their life experience and the way it criss-crosses that of those with whom they take THE HUMAN JOURNEY®.

It even works with remote Zoom participants, who may be in different parts of the city, country, or world. And people find, just as if they were walking it, that it gives them insight, perspective – and a way to find those things … together.

Come walk with us when you train to conduct THJ® for families and support groups.

March 9, 2021

There is Nothing so Wise as a Circle

There is nothing so wise as a circle.

What is the power of sitting in a circle, of breaking our very Western demand that one person be the focus of all the others?

From insisting that all the kids face the teacher, kindergarten classrooms have Circle Time, when community is emphasized and any issues that affect the group can be brought up.

From our face-front world, retreat center events conduct their events frequently in circles, and people jet or speed home, feeling they’ve communed with kindred spirits.

From the antagonistic, one against one (or many against many) world of street crime, young people may avoid incarceration in part by entering restorative justice circles, where they learn the power of speaking and being heard.

Even much leadership training breaks executives’ reticence down by placing them, too, in a circle formation. Despite their white-hot grip on their cell phones (which they may think invisible in a speaker-forward, kid-at-the-back-of-the-class formation) they must bare their hearts to the group … not through anything they say, but through their very positions, literally exposing the heart area to the whole group at once.

There is nowhere to hide in a circle.

There is also no way to dominate.

The circle demands that you show up, remembering that, as the saying goes, “You are not better than anyone, and no one is better than you.” The circle demands both radical courage and radical humility, the enactment of the noble belief that the singular human being is simultaneously everything and nothing.

In THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, whether our participants are facing the computer to participate with family or support group members from afar, or they are at bedside around a patient, in a traditional support-group circle, or around a dining or coffee table, the trained THJ® Conductor ensures their even participation, softening and equalizing the inevitable power plays, accreted baggage, and habitual ways of relating. With their skill (and yours with just eight hours of small group training), the power of the circle can bring its wisdom as they chart the future they want to have together.

In another post, we’ll share how the eternal form of the labyrinth — a very special kind of circle — found its way into THE HUMAN JOURNEY® … and how participants get themselves into … and out of it.

Photo of Stu Klitsner & Steve McQueen in bowler hats, looking at each other playfully, with a guitar in hand, in The Towering Inferno

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

The will to make it to a loved one’s graduation or wedding, or to the birth of a new baby, somehow compels the body to obey the will. Stu Klitsner was going to sing at his only granddaughter’s wedding, come hell or high water.

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

Chaplains exercise their humanness with every patient or family member they meet. What are the parallels between the kind of presence chaplains bring in the spiritual realm and that of the dancer who sees her choreography and performance as a kind of chaplaincy?

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

Public health has gotten bigger and bigger in recent decades. What was only thought of in the past as individual choices, like drug addiction, gun violence, or smoking crossed over to be thought of by many as social issues and, eventually, as matters of public health. With the Surgeon General’s report that came out in May, 2023, loneliness and isolation may assume their place alongside them as social epidemics.

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

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.

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Anxiety explained visually by illustrator-social worker Lindsay Braman.

Activities & Tools

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.

June 7, 2023 No Comments

March 4, 2021

What’s with The Hero’s Journey?

You may, as I have, noticed lately lots and lots of people connecting what they do with the “Hero’s Journey,” that famous archetypal story structure made famous by Joseph Campbell. In the past week alone, I’ve seen people hooking the Hero’s Journey up with everything from leadership training to how to network to strategies for getting through the pandemic.

The Hero’s Journey has become the foundation of Hollywood films.

But that’s only because it already replicates what’s been happening in the human experience — way before films were a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

The Hero’s Journey gives a name to an eternal structure for how our folk stories become satisfying to listen to as well as to live.

But today let’s get small.

Why is that word used so da– much?

There’s the the grief journey, the customer journey, the band named Journey, the Journey shoe brand, the Dodge Journey, the mental health journey, the parenting journey, even the Girl Scouts Journey.

The word is plum everywhere. And why?

Here’s my stab at it: It’s one of our root metaphors for what it is to “go” through life. To experience something in time. To be in one “place” at one point and at a different “place” at another.

The image of the journey gives spatial reference points to the fact that we feel we’re different after something momentous has happened or after we’ve “gone” through a key process or after our consciousness has “shifted” in some way.

“I’m in a different place now.”
“He’s in a better place.” (whether mentally or when some people respond to news of someone’s death)

Calling something a journey is a way of giving placefulness to time-based events that seem linked.
It’s a way of making real.

When I use the word “journey,” I’m always reminded of high-school French, where I learned we inherited the word in English from “journée,” that distance one could travel in a day’s time.

That linking of time and space. A way to see and regard the invisible that one feels. A way to make the living one does a thing.

Pretty good for one word.

End of Life

Where can you walk and walk and yet not get anywhere?

There is Nothing so Wise as a Circle

There is nowhere to hide in a circle.