The Chaplain’s Feet


At the end of the THE HUMAN JOURNEY session, she said her faith, trust, and resilience were strengthened.


 

Have you watched, as I have, the transition in many speakers’ English in the last few years, as we’ve switched from referring to “human beings” and moved on to calling them simply “humans”?

 

For me, the abbreviated term still sounds odd but it does stress our animal nature; we are perhaps like “antelopes,” “wildcats,” or “snakes.” There is no such thing—yet—as a “snake being.”

 

Yet what either a “human being” or a “human” is, is a lifelong search and it kept coming up this week. A dear friend told me about the first meeting she attended of a spiritual discussion group whose opening topic was the little question, “What is a human being?”

 

And then Hank Kinzie, currently completing his training as a certified THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Conductor, described his work as a leadership coach as “helping executives to be human.” Hank’s description brought me back to how I once described the teaching of theatre directing to my college students … as basically “teaching people to be human in intimate relationships.” (The intimacy is needed when you direct actors because you’re talking about how other people look, speak, move, and otherwise express themselves and very often, you’re asking for it to be other than it is. As you might guess, trust is necessary for this.)

 

Chaplains exercise their humanness with every patient or family member they meet. A patient is “one who suffers”; the patient chaplain is the one who can help them bear their suffering, emptying herself of, or softening, the alarm bells of her own spirit, emptying the mental and physical hall of everyday noise so as to be fully attentive to what someone else so desperately needs — to be held in deep presence. She grounds into her most basic (perhaps animal) nature, silencing her own thoughts, her biases about any “right” way to face the big questions, and receives the patient in, or on, the ground of their earthly co-inhabitance.

 

It is, perhaps (and metaphorically speaking!), a job for the chaplain’s feet, in which grounding and solidifying into earthly presence, is the way.

 

So what’s a “movement chaplain”?

 

Someone who dances with the patient? Someone who helps those newly immobilized? Someone who counsels a gymnastics troupe?

 

Close.

 

It’s a chaplain who offers spiritual and emotional support to those engaged in “bodily activism,” who, in essence, put their feet behind their words, and engage in activism and street demonstrations, or “movements,” to protest policies or to advocate for new, more socially just ones. Recently, such activists and organizers have been involved in actions for such causes as Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights.

 

Though the term may be new, ScottBey Jones, who directs the Faith Matters Network in Nashville, trains chaplains in movement chaplaincy, helping them get on the ground and ready to catch those who need courage, a long view, or a touchpoint with their faith and hope. 

 

But the dancer image is also not far off.

 

If in seeing the term “movement chaplain” you connected physical movement (like dance) with chaplaincy, you’re on track with Keely Garfield, who sees her work as a chaplain completely intertwined with her profession as a dancer/choreographer. In a feature on her recent choreographic work, “The Invisible Project,” Garfield links the two: Both are simply “the work of being a human being.” (Maybe Garfield didn’t get the memo about the change to “human.”)

 

Again, there is an unspoken relationship between the words “patience” and “patient” in “Invisible Project.” The real work of a chaplain, Garfield says, is to almost become invisible. It comes down to how present she can be, how well she can listen. Garfield’s being has been immersed in a Zen koan:

 

How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?

 

Body exposed in the golden wind.

 

“That could be the … theme of my life: Body exposed in the golden wind,” she says. Observed one of her dancers of “The Invisible Project” — “a dance made in the context of COVID” —  “It’s a lot to hold so many people’s stories in your body, and so many people close to passing, or in crisis or trauma, in your body.”

 

Being Human — With Other Humans

Ultimately, that’s some of what training to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY does for chaplains, social workers, compassionate citizens, counselors, and clergy.

It helps you be there, a human settled and open to receive another being’s humanness, in a structure that itself helps them to unfold in your presence and in the presence of those who love them but don’t know how to express it.

Our tested, reliable structure supports both individuals and groups constructing meaning out of the worst times in their lives … using the building blocks of their own lives. In so doing, they find their footing going forward, through and past the hell of the moment, into a positive future that embraces them all. Use your feet and help them find theirs.

 

Learn more about, and certify in, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® methodology. 

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    Whacking a Gun


    The participants were very deeply attuned to each other by the end of the first act. There was a noticeable shift in the serious way they all held space for each other. There were moments of shared experience and relatability, moments of deep empathy when someone talked about coming from a hard place, and lots of “aha” moments as they all collectively made more sense to each other.


    If you’ve ever heard the clanking of a blacksmith’s hammer against an anvil, you know it has a distinct, medium-high pitch, an oddly comforting sound, as if business is getting taken care of, and strong, determined people, perhaps channeling the energy of Greek god Hephaestus, are nearby.

     

    An urban dweller like me rarely has occasion to hear that sound. Even so, the music of the clanking on the terrace just outside last week’s Parliament of the World’s Religions, held for thousands of interfaith and peace leaders and workers in Chicago, reached my ears for three days, out on the lakeside terrace of the conference center, before I was drawn near by the sound of a folksinger accompanying the labor and singing his heart out.

     

    It was neither horseshoes nor cabinet hinges that the blacksmiths were making that had caused Parliament attendees to form a line to take their turn at helping.

     

    What these blacksmiths from RAWTools were doing was taking surrendered guns from a variety of sources and re-forming them into garden hand tools, embodying their mission and message of peace as elegantly as possible. The organization takes literally the passage from the Book of Isaiah to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

     

    A chance to help pound instruments that can kill into tools that can bring forth new life? I got into line and awaited my turn to put on the suede work apron and goggles. 

     

     

    The 1893 Moment

    The Parliament of the World’s Religions — which attracts people who are engaged in interfaith work from all over the world, and from more than 200 different world religions or spiritual traditions — has its roots in Chicago, dating from the 1893 World’s Fair.

     

    At this Columbian Exposition, Chicago got its chance to compete with Paris’s Eiffel Tower by introducing the Ferris Wheel (in other countries referred to as the “Chicago Wheel”) along with other prized local inventions, including Cracker Jacks, Juicy Fruit gum, zippers, and the first modern skyscraper, which had been built only five years before. 

     

    I was excited to attend the Parliament in its — and my — home city, including partly at sites where the 1893 World’s Fair took birth, including at the Art Institute of Chicago.

     

    The inspiration for the Parliament dates from September 11th that year when religions of the world had the opportunity, for the first time, to represent themselves publicly, rather than be represented through an outsider’s distorting lens. Most notably, it was when Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda shocked and delighted Westerners in the audience by addressing them as “Sisters and Brothers of America!” and showing them the many commonalities between Eastern and Western faith traditions, calling for religious tolerance, opening East-West dialogue for the rest of us, and certainly changing American spiritual cultures in marked ways.

     

    You can expand this image and start to read Vivekananda’s speech at the site of the Art Institute of Chicago in this 2017 public installation, entitled Public Notice 3, by Mumbai-born artist Jitish Kallat on AIC’s grand staircase. 

     

    The Healing of No More

     

    When I reached the top of the line, it was my turn to let a gun have it with the hammer as the blacksmith steadied the barrel with his tongs. To begin the work of beating a glowing-red sword, fresh from the forge, into a ploughshare. And, like the others, I did so with the energy of someone whose work is about peace.

     

    A worker for peace in the Middle East insisted at the Parliament, “We must let go of an idyllic concept of peace. We will have peace with problems, but not peace with violence.” Peace becomes working together to solve those problems. And RAWTools does more than invite people to surrender their weapons. It teaches nonviolent means to resolve problems.

     

    When I finally had to relinquish my hammer, the line had gotten even longer. I stood near to watch and learned that RAWTools typically invites those whose lives have been directly impacted by gun violence to come to the head of the line. I heard the story of a woman who had lost a child to gun violence who, taking the hammer, brought it down over and over again with full force, crying out, “Enough is ENOUGH!”

     

    Learn more about, and certify in, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® methodology. 


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      A Vaccine for Loneliness?


      You're part of the same fabric, but you're a different thread.


       

      In 2020, being an epidemiologist suddenly became sexy. People who’d previously had zero interest in public health, or who had had no idea what it was, were following epidemiologists on social media; the germ trackers were the hottest guests on TV news. Epidemiologist parents of young children could put their kids to bed and then proudly imagine their kids telling their kids, down the line, that grandma had been an epidemiologist, and their grandkids sighing wistfully and saying they wish they had known her and maybe they could follow in her footsteps.

      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.

      The report represented an evolution in Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s thinking over nine years of listening to the American public and reading in the scientific literature. Loneliness is correlated with tremendous impacts on physical health, greater than those for either obesity or inactivity, and similar to those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, with increases in cardiovascular disease, stroke, dimension, and premature death — not to mention depression and anxiety. It turns out, as Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo has said“We are each other’s key to a long life and healthy life.”

      Yet it still flatters the individualism of those who don’t smoke — or who are insensitive to smoke — or who are unaware of the dangers of secondary smoke — to see smoking as someone else’s problem or their character flaw. In many people’s minds still, smoking has nothing to do with marketing cigarettes to vulnerable populations, with how prejudice impacts behavior, much less with the potential effectiveness of public education and incentives that would make it easier to quit.
       

      But, then again, these sexy epidemiologists have generally been ahead of the popular imagination, seeing such problems as requiring whole societies’ attitudes, choices, and behavior to shift and our best social vision, cooperation, and innovation to address.
       

      Many of the health issues that go beyond communicable diseases that we’re still hard put to see as affecting individuals also affect the physical and mental health of others and even their lives, in the case of gun violence.

      With loneliness the social impacts may be equally and more widespread, even, as in Dr. Murthy’s (and others’) views it may lead to the total breakdown of our democratic society. Murthy connects loneliness to the increasing polarization in our country and to the survival of our democracy. Loneliness changes the brain, increasing paranoid thinking, vigilance, and creating a vicious circle in which they very brain signals that would ordinarily trigger someone to reach out for social connection instead make them fear others. 
       is correlated with paranoid thinking and even with violence.

      So what does our Surgeon General put forth as potential solutions?

      • Structural and policy change to increase interdependence and connection.
      • Altering our relationship to technology.
      • And rebuilding and strengthening the social connections we already have.

       
      You know where I’m going with this. THE HUMAN JOURNEY® is about reducing the sense of loneliness that can people have, even within their closest relationships, that bite them in the butt when crisis comes:

      • A parent’s need for 24-hour care, when only one sibling lives close and they know they’re in over their head;
      • The impending loss from breast cancer of the core member of your friend group from college, whom everyone saw as their own best friend; or
      • The loss that no one in the family can talk about because it feels just too raw.

      Our Conductors are both what we call Compassionate Citizens—those who are aware of the need and ready to offer their care by offering this innovative, well-structured experience — and professionals in the fields of care management, chaplaincy, hospice, palliative care, counseling, end of life doula work, and social work who have seen the gap in what is offered to families in the pain of transition and what is truly needed.

      Learn more about, and certify in, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® methodology. 

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        Grief on the Comedy Stage

         

        You no doubt know by now that THJ helps groups come together in the face of difficult diagnoses, end of life, bereavement, and even other major life transitions.

        We’ll talk here about the role of laughter in bringing groups — even groups that grieve — together. We hope you’ll join us for training! 

         


        “Do not hesitate!”

         

        Recently, the New York Times featured a story about a seemingly new trend in stand-up comedy: using death and grief as comic material. “That’s the Funny Thing About Grief” tracks how common the subjects of death and grief are these days in the work of stand-up comics.

         

        Is it in supremely bad taste, or career-limiting, to use these serious subjects on the American comedy stage?

         

        Healthy and young people have mortality, death, and grief on the minds in ways they may not have prior to 2020. Members of Generation Z think about death more than any other generation, with 35% thinking about it every day. More than 50% of all American adults think about their deaths more often than before they did before the pandemic. With death on so many more people’s minds, it stands to reason that it would be in the popular consciousness and appearing in pop culture in new ways — indeed, that it would be bursting to come out.

         

        We may be more receptive to comedy that leaves a “respectful” amount of time (whatever that is) between a painful event and its treatment in literature or other art forms. For many years, 9/11 was off limits.

         

        In the years after 9/11, articles appeared in the popular media in which their authors would muse about how much time would have to pass before one could produce comedy about a national event that had at once produced enormous loss of life and attacked Americans’ sense of invulnerability.

         

        Writers and comics had to consider:

         

        • Whom would a joke hurt?
        • Whose memories would it disrespect? and …
        • What kinds of people have we become if we’re even capable of creating comedy out of loss?

         

        Does the Taboo Make Any Sense?

         

        But we might consider a broadly held assumption that grief and loss don’t belong in comedy. Re-visiting a painful event through a comedic and performative lens — provided that event has been grieved to a large extent — might actually help both performer and audience. Using their creative writing and timing when engaging with a live audience could conceivably provide a healing communal experience, easing the natural isolation of the grief experience. Shared laughter can improve mood, boost the immune system, and ease pain. It can relax muscles, decrease your heart rate and blood pressure, and release dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins.

         

        And perhaps it is not inappropriate to share, particularly if it is about the author’s own condition or grief, if it is their own story to tell, rather than trying to own someone else’s, including making any assumptions about the audience’s experience.

         

        Breaking such a taboo might even break the ice of a shared reality.  When Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch, who was well-known to have pancreatic cancer, was slated to give his final public lecture, the audience flocked to hear him. His presentational style in that talk could be described as ebullient. At one point he quipped, “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be … sorry to disappoint you!”

         

        Comedy in the Family Gathering Post-Funeral

        In my own extended family of cousins engaged professionally, semi-professionally, or simply by proximity in show business, gatherings at the house after a funeral ceremony has always included funny as well as moving stories. It simply wouldn’t be like the Klitsners (yes, you’re free to chuckle) not to laugh in the midst of tears.

         

        Those stories bank on the eccentric or particular behaviors of the person who had died, those habits or ways of a person that endeared him or her to us, or even annoyed us, in similar ways. It was the unique ways in which they questioned the world, the scrapes they would get themselves into that made the person themselves memorable, all the more important after their death.

         

        I’ve always loved when such stories would start out with the something that the person “would” do over and over again, as if on automatic. (I finally learned in writing this what’s the “would” is called: the “habitual aspect.”)

         

        Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as what happens when what is human seems to be mechanical, acting out of keeping with the norms of a given situation. (The idea of the habitual or mechanical also can become comical when used to poke fun at someone who’s still alive: the boss who doesn’t, but pretends to, know more than his employees; the toddler who says things to nasty relatives his parents wish they could get away with.) The pleasure of the laugh, whether the person being jostled is dead or alive, is perhaps most enjoyable when the audience shares the same knowledge of the person and can recognize their interactions in the speaker’s tale.

         

        So comedy while the performer or storyteller is grieving … comedy that holds up the personality of the person who’s died … comedy that acknowledges an experience all have shared and done work on grieving: all stand the chance not only of success at humor but also success in supporting both individual and group healing.

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          Very pale woman with scarf covering her hair and hospital drip at side, looking out window.

          What If It Could All Be Comfort Care?

          When you’re in pain, it’s hard to think of anything else. But even in the midst of being laid up with a bad back or during that excruciating moment after surgery when you realize that, no, it isn’t that the operation was a breeze, it’s just that you had really good painkillers, there are almost always parts of you that do feel well: they’re just a bit harder to access. Even when everything is going smoothly. 

          Many of us are hardly aware of our bodies when they’re feeling well — one reason we may run them into the ground through overindulgence or lack of attention. But when something is painful, most of us tend to actually get a sensation of pain.

          Retired nurse (now coach) Jack Hopkins published on social media some of the techniques he used to assess patients in pain and to provide them with comfort care that actually eased their perception of pain, resulting in what he held was a 15-20% reduction in the pain medication they would require after his shift or in contrast with the shift preceding his.

          What Hopkins did was to transpose the commonly used pain scale, which asks patients to associate the pain they are experiencing with a number from one to 10. (When I’ve been the target of one of these demands to rate my pain on a numeric scale, I always felt as though I were being asked to translate a cuneiform text into pig latin: just did not compute.) Rather than ask for a pain number, Hopkins would ask for a comfort number: how did this moment of comfort compare with the the scale of of the most and least comfort his patient had experienced in the past?

          Through Hopkins’s “reverse pain level assessment,” he reinforced a different set of associations, memories of comfort and ease in the body as well as, likely, moments that surrounded those memories that were pleasant emotionally and in all kinds of sensory ways. No doubt, remembering the absence of pain and the presence of comfort is more demanding — especially when you’re in pain — but it both distracts and conjures up memories that can have some of the same physiological effects on the body when recalled as when first experienced. 

          Hopkins had a second technique, one perhaps you’ve seen before in some form. He used verb tense very consciously in his questions to patients about their pain. While doctors would brush into patient rooms and typically ask about the pain they are having, Hopkins would set his questions to patients about their pain in the past tense, inquiring instead about the pain they “have had,” rather than the pain they are currently in.

          With this subtle adjustment, he opened space for patients to perceive their pain, at least in part, as behind them, rather than as that thing so present they couldn’t see anything else. As he helped them “sculpt their inner life,” as he put it, Hopkins opened patients up to a way of seeing that could tolerate ambiguity, offering a more nuanced sense of the present moment, which arguably would make whatever pain is present easier to bear.

          For the patient suffering with profound bone pain, tolerating ambiguity could open her to interpersonal and sensory pleasures that, along with medication, could also reduce her perception of pain, not erasing pain but making it in many ways easier to bear, much as we do with families facing serious diagnosis, anticipatory grief, and loss. 

          Join us in one of our 2023 trainings to learn how families facing challenging circumstances can learn to tolerate the pain they are in via our smartly social means of deepening the family bonds, the ability to hear each other at the level of values, and shifting perspective.

          I welcome you! If you’d like to meet or to ask questions before registering, just let me know or schedule a time to meet here.

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          Contact Us

            Just How Many Hats Can a Person Wear?

            “Reality Checker”

            “Mask Patrol”

            “Zoom Bouncer”

            “Sanitizer Squadron”

            “Nurse Life Supporter”

            “Camera Pleader”

            “Counselor”

             

            These were some of the many “hats” that staff at a special education district identified a few weeks ago as ones they had adopted during the pandemic, when I returned there after a pandemic hiatus to conduct a professional development workshop. 

            Within the blink of an eye, this adaptive physical education teacher was teaching rotating video workouts to a bunch of students in boxes.

            This teacher had to try helplessly over Zoom to reach students who needed her there physically.

            And the pandemic made this teacher feel even more strongly she wore the “hat” of the family therapist.

            As the pandemic waned, these hats didn’t disappear: no, they simply formed the basis for a whole now-ongoing set of social roles, demands, and responsibilities for educators and support staff to meet the needs of students with autism, multiple disabilities, emotional disabilities, developmental delays, hearing impairments, visual impairments, other health impairments, learning disabilities, and intellectual disabilities. 

             

            Much of the work with students with special needs necessarily has more movement or kinesthetic elements than students in general classrooms get to enjoy — hence, my more typical work with this district had historically involved teaching how to adapt the methods of yoga sequencing and breathing and its attentional techniques to the work of adaptive physical education teachers, physical therapists, social workers, and classroom instructors and aides.

             

            Last month was the first in-person staff event I’d conducted since the beginning of the pandemic. Onsite in a good-sized gymnasium at the district, it was a welcome shock to be in person in a large working group once again. I’d wanted to do something a bit different this year, guessing — as it turned out, correctly — that the role shifts for educators over the course of these last few eventful years has never been fully acknowledged, much less processed, in the course of the nationwide crisis that put such pressure on them.

             

            Lost in the increased and altered demands on them, administrators hadn’t had time or attention, perhaps, to help the teachers reckon with the significant changes in their professional roles. So I wanted to create a structure within which they could:

             

            1. Name those roles or “hats” they have had to adopt;
            2. Explore their relationship to all the hats they wear;
            3. Make the hats they wear now feel more choosable; and
            4. Experience a gentle yoga practice that would give them a physical experience beyond role altogether.   

              
            Teachers’ jobs were notable because of the ways in which the pandemic first altered, and then kept altering in fresh ways, their relationship to the public and to students. These educators and social service providers were like other professionals I’d worked with during the pandemic — trying to function on the front line while dealing with some of the same anxieties and losses that their own students, clients, patients were. They were isotragic (not a word, but let’s use it) — in a constant state of trying to function as if they were only the providers rather than also those who needed help.

             

            It’s from these kinds of situations that my grief groups for frontline organizational staff members arose during the pandemic. While national focus has gone to the healthcare workers who sacrificed so much during the pandemic and yet continued to serve other families, educators, community service workers, and many other institutional workers also had to do heavy emotional lifting of others as they suffered the same losses and many, like the educators I had the opportunity to work with last month, transitioned into this theoretically easier period we’re in now without acknowledgment.

             

            Yet, as one of the teachers brought up — and others agreed — in a way, this period has its own real challenges, too: their roles have absorbed everything they had to do before, plus everything they also took on during the pandemic and now still do — and they wear all those hats while there’s been a flight from the field by all those who burned out or couldn’t take on the additional health risks. With less help and more responsibility, they’ve been trying to adjust to a vastly altered landscape of what it means to do the work they entered the field to do.

             

            The grief groups have helped frontline educators and social service providers both learn about grief and learn and practice ways to relate helpfully to colleagues’ and clients’ heightened grief over the past few years in the isotragic environments in which they work. And they have started workers on ways to create the more compassionate work environments for grievers that are so needed.

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            Becoming the Witness

             

            I’m an avid reader of Twitter for its political and epidemiological news, which often appear prior to (and prove more informative than) what can be made available under the rubric of conventional media. I continue to be struck by a story that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nadja Drost shared on Twitter — moving in part because of what it says about the power of witnessing another’s struggle.

            A Bangladeshi man named Ripon appeared at Drost’s front stoop in New York City. While she did not recognize him, he clearly recognized her and called her by her first name. Now delivering food by bike in New York, Ripon had made the arduous journey across the Darién Gap, regarded as one of the most hazardous possible journeys in the world for migrants.

            The Darién Gap stretches from Colombia to Panama, connecting South America to Central America. Migrants from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world cross the 66-mile jungle and subject themselves to robbery, starvation, and death in order to flee conditions in their home countries. Drost’s Pulitzer Prize was for a feature she had written about Cameroonian and Pakistani refugees and migrants whose best choice was to brave it in their quest to reach America.

            Ripon, a political refugee who had received death threats in Bangladesh, had recognized Drost on the basis of a PBS series that followed up on the initial story. Here, she embedded with a group of migrants crossing the Darién, undergoing the same immediate conditions they did. The work she and her videographer, Bruno Federico, did allowed Ripon to convey to his relatives back home what he had undergone in the jungle, including having been robbed of everything by bandits and seeing the skeletons of prior migrants who did not make it.

            Here are Drost and Federico on her stoop with Ripon pointing to his photo in the original story. (It’s the same photo, shown closer up, at the top of this email.)

             

             

            What If?

            As far as I know, Drost’s story produced neither asylum nor work for Ripon. It simply gave witness to what he underwent. 

            Having someone take in your experience, really take it in, is a gift. 

            So here’s an invitation to a perception experiment: What if this day your job was to bear witness to another’s experience, no matter what it may be? What array of consciousnesses are offering themselves to your witness over the course of this day?  

             

            They all loved the experience, and commented after how they feel more connected with each other and how they understand each other a lot more.

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            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.

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            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.

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            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.

            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.
             
            In THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience, our trained THJ Conductors help family members move into, and then beyond, their “stories” to hold them just a little more lightly. You can watch their beings lighten as this starts to happen—and you can see them free up to be more present to the others in their families. They move from isolation and private pain to a shared exhale, and the crisis they face becomes something they can handle – together. Join us to learn to conduct THJ®You’ll help families dealing with end of life, addiction, health or care transition, isolation, alienation, or crises of meaning.

            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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            We can hold each other’s stories more tightly—and our own, less

            We get caught up in the stories of who we think we are, what we’ve achieved (or not), and what qualities we think we possess.
            During my grad-school years in New York City, I enjoyed overhearing over lunch what would become familiar patterns of one-on-one lunch conversations all
            around me.

            “Look, I’m not the kind of person who is quick to
            anger, but …” began one woman as she launched, post-pastrami, into a tale of how her daughter’s religious-school director had provoked her beyond recognition.

            “Who does that?” eked out another through gritted teeth, throwing her hands up in the air and into the arms of a scurrying waitperson, defining herself by the kind of
            behavior she would never, but never, perform herself. Her companion rolled his eyes as the two of them in ready coordination scooted their curry dishes around
            each other on the table to help the other sample them.

            In both of these cases, the speaker conveyed a sense
            that, in order to construct a self, she or he has to position before a friend a fairly rigid version of themselves, like the sculptural costumes of the modern dance company Pilobolus, a kind of personality into which to step and stand,
            get sewn in, and only then be recognized.

            Our work, in becoming more human and more mature, is to hold our own stories—including such stories of our “selves”—more lightly, allowing for more flexibility in our responsiveness. Our stories and experiences still exist but, paradoxically, we both have and transcend them in
            order to become less bound to a single concept of who we are.

            Spiritual teachers such as Byron Katie (and many
            others) advocate questioning the truth of the stories we tell ourselves. Katie even instructs students of her method to turn a story into its opposite and to gauge its truth, which may be as great as, or even greater than, the original story.

            What helps with the process of lightening up is
            listening to another’s deep story. Just as helping others can lift our own moods, listening well to others can be an experience of releasing our hold on our senses of self. If we can hold the reality that someone else is living with
            and lighten up on the tightness of the grip we place on our own, we stand the chance of developing compassion. Our heart is truly light enough to be able to “go out to” them. And, when we are being truly empathetic, the sense of ourselves and others belonging to each other in quiet equivalence grows.

            Maybe try an aspect of this idea out for yourself. You could determine not how you want to “be” next time the occasion calls on you to listen well to help a family member or friend, but what you want to provide or do. Do you want to provide a “safe space” for them to share whatever they need to? Do you want to listen for what they are feeling but haven’t said yet and ask gentle and appropriate questions? Do you want to reflect back to them what you think you’ve heard?

            None of these strategies has anything to do with
            putting forward “the kind of person you are,” like my pastrami-saturated eavesdroppee. Yet you will likely find that you feel more centered, more solid outside the bounds of personality and story. And your bond with the other will feel that much deeper.

            Our work with the two-hour, facilitated experience
            called THE HUMAN JOURNEY® situates members of a group or family right within their history and their stories, and then, with a graduated method of listening, interaction, and the cultivation of a sense of the group as being larger than any individual, brings participants to that point of lightness with themselves and substance with each other. It’s proven useful for families deepening their sense of belonging in hard times and is now in practice in the healthcare
            setting.

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            The Non-Black Story of THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

            THE HUMAN JOURNEY® is owned by a white woman.

            Before releasing the THJ® game experience and Conductor training to the public, we tested and went back to the drawing board to refine the experience — painstakingly — over and over again.

            But we did not test with families with Black members. We invited them but were not successful in signing them on. We did go forward with the families outside of a white Judeo-Christian cultural paradigm we could get—Latino, Muslim. (They were by no means as heavily represented as those within that paradigm.)

            You could say, well, you tried. You tried to recruit Black families. You did your due diligence.

            But we did not then examine why Black families were hard to reach or hard to get to agree to test.

            Since then, African-Americans have participated in training to conduct the THJ® experience. One suggested we apply what we know about the design of group experiences to the hard issues of creating long-term Restorative Justice in our communities. Since that suggestion last fall—which seemed entirely right—we began investigating both the field of RJ and how communities and police build relationships. We have a lot yet to learn as we build and test THE HUMAN JOURNEY® edition with communities.

            This is not about white guilt. It is about white responsibility. THJ® is examining the networks it has, the organizations it seeks to do business with, and the services it provides so that they better address the needs of a wider swath of the public seeking ways to build peace and belonging both small-scale within families and support communities, and on a bigger scale between groups.

            We want to hear from those who are interested in helping us do that.

            We also want to encourage the majority of businesses in healthcare, home care, and other fields serving the public that are white-owned, but Black- and immigrant-staffed, to listen, to take the risk of looking foolish by asking genuine questions, and, with us, to seek out one thing on this helpful list that they can begin to do to address the power differential that allows them to own such a business. It is no accident that so many of us are white.

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