How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works – THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

A stylized portrait of the Founding Fathers at Mount Rushmore

March 18, 2023

So, Who’s the Father?

“So, Who’s the Father?” isn’t exactly what a person who’s expecting wants to hear. It can feel like an accusation, like an invasion of privacy, or like a completely irrelevant question, depending on one’s method of conception, key relationships, or plan for childrearing. Even in days when there were fewer methods for conceiving a child or for avenues for getting one to adulthood, Emily Post might have advised just to stick with a hearty congratulations.

All that stuck in my mind as I read a father’s bemused, delighted, but also partially baffled telling of something that happened when he was tucking his toddler daughter into bed one night. She reached her arms up around his neck for one last goodnight kiss and then, wriggling more securely under the covers, smiled up at him and said, “You’re the best daddy I ever had.” It certainly caused him some reflection after she was long asleep.

It’s intriguing to take that literally. So, who were the other daddies? (Bear with me; we’re going on a journey.)

The Possibility of Multiples

I decided to go down this rabbit hole for a while just to have a bit of a fantastical exploration. Recently, I became aware of the intriguing decades-long work done, up to his death in 2007, by psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson. Founding the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Stevenson had had an early-career interest in psychosomatic medicine. His later research into medical cases that neither genetics nor environment seemed to explain took him down the road of exploring whether, without committing to a “belief” in the phenomenon, reincarnation could be the best explanation we have thus far for diseases that didn’t yield to any other apparent cause. Stevenson ended up spending decades examining cases that were “suggestive of reincarnation,” without ever committing himself to a notion that such a phenomenon exists or is the operative explanatory structure for phenomena that could not otherwise be explained. (One of the hardest-to-explain phenomena is that all of this was able to take place under the auspices of a medical school, one of our most conservative academic fixtures.)

Both Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, Stevenson’s protégé, now the current director of the Division for Perception Studies, focused on children who recounted details of previous lives. Because the Division received hundreds of times more cases than the ones they could research in any depth, it has focused its resources on cases where there was some physical evidence that could not otherwise be explained by fraud, parental influence, or any other factors and yet bore some connection to a verifiable aspect of the child’s memory. A rare placement of a congenital deformity or birth defect in the exact place of the gunshot wound that took the “previous” life. A case of “responsive xenoglossy,” in which a child has the ability, without any possible explanation for having learned it naturally, to speak another language. A lot of mind-blowing stuff!

Children who relate aspects of previous lives tend to lose the details as they enter school age even as they forget memories of their immediate early childhood, perhaps as these memories are cleared out to make way for new learning. And yet, if reincarnation exists, somehow biographical memories get stored in something that transcend the individual lifetime. And that something in a sense is the ancestor of anything that happens in the current lifetime. It makes the existence of a “best daddy” something to ponder.

So, who's the best daddy in THE HUMAN JOURNEY?

Back to who’s the best daddy.

Is it the immediate, biological daddy who tucked the girl in?

It’s easy to see the ways in which we are children of the conditions into which we were born, the gifts with which we were endowed, and our biological and cultural parents, whoever they may be. The first two sections of the THJ Experience trace these connections and draw out the gratitude, awe, and shared history, memories, and resources that bind groups together.

“The child is the father of the man”

Remember this Wordsworth line, though, from your school days? You can imagine that, as an adult, you can also be the offspring or outcomes of yourself as a child (or, really, at any time in the past)—in other words, a product of the choices you make as you go along.

In many ways, the middle section of THE HUMAN JOURNEY® plays this view out as we move from memory to responsibility. The child becomes “the father of the man” as the THJ Experience turns its focus to the interplay among each participant’s choices in life, the character that is formed by those choices, and the spiritual points of view they adopt.

Whether or not you go so far as to believe in multiple lifetimes, it’s a bit of a mind stretch to imagine even that, from moment to moment, we are birthing the next instantiation of ourselves, making decisions that will certainly impact what comes next, and effecting judgments now that will serve as the foundation for later ones. We keep birthing ourselves.

Any more daddies?

By Act III of the THJ Experience, a whole new “daddy” emerges. Act III takes the threads of what has transpired in this transformative event to weave something new for the future of the family or support group. So who’s the “daddy” of each participant, or of the group, by the time the Experience reaches its conclusion? (One we herald as being pretty reliable in getting groups to a place of deeper connectedness, groundedness, and capacity for listening for values.)

It’s not just the biological parents. It’s not just the person one once has been. It’s something more ineffable than a person or perhaps even a soul or spirit that transcends lifetimes—and yet it’s key. It’s the literal group moment in which Act III takes place, the challenge it presents to the participants to bring to life a future that can allow each of them to become within the group organism that they are co-creating. That group, in the moment in which the THJ Conductor holds them, have all the parental power possible to enact and commit to a future that sustains the group forward.

We’d love to prepare you to take groups anticipating or experiencing a loss, recovering from substance abuse, or seeking a way forward from any major transition through this Experience that uses the “daddies” they know to become, from the alchemy of the group, the ancestor of their future. It’s a beautiful thing to orchestrate and you do experience, along with the participants, the new group self that emerges. Join us to learn how to bring this experience to your patients, clients, and families.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

So, Who’s the Father?” isn’t exactly what a person who’s expecting wants to hear. It can feel like an accusation, like an invasion of privacy, or like a completely irrelevant question, depending on one’s method of conception, key relationships, or plan for childrearing. Even in days when there were fewer methods for conceiving a child or for avenues for getting one to adulthood, Emily Post might have advised just to stick with a hearty congratulations.

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

We called it that, recognizing that grief is a very physical thing and that sometimes what grievers most need (aside from not being asked if they need anything) is not to talk but to be. Just a creature.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Distressed young woman in bed, with her eyes closed, her hand high on her chest, near her throat, and a pillow on her lap.

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

You’ve seen it a thousand times on television. Just a bit of momentary drama to set the stage. It’s a medical show. Someone is having an anxiety attack. Maybe he’s hyperventilating. The medical professional or first responder fixes her eyes on this (typically) mouth breather

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

It’s super fun to watch someone’s thinking shift right in front of you. They might jerk still suddenly, their eyes wide and long, like old cartoon figures in a haunted house or a dark cave, when all you could see was the eyes. That’s part of the joy

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

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

January 10, 2023 No Comments

February 7, 2023

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

You’ve seen it a thousand times on television. Just a bit of momentary drama to set the stage. It’s a medical show. Someone is having an anxiety attack. Maybe he’s hyperventilating.

The medical professional or first responder fixes her eyes on this (typically) mouth breather and says emphatically and slowly, “Follow me. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

And then, in an exaggerated fashion, the medical professional demonstrates, raising her shoulders with the inhalation and looking all better and grounded on each exhalation, as she tries to get the person in crisis in her office or at a crash scene, school, or hospital to mirror her.

Somehow, within three of these breaths, the person is miraculously back to normal.

Is that all there is?

Breath can do a lot more for you besides anxiety management.

Breath control is the secret sauce of changing your emotional state. You can raise your basic energy level, focus your attention, or even feel more attuned with those around you by the breath pattern you adopt.

Joining in with, or matching, another’s breath rhythm is so powerful that (for better or worse) it’s taught as a sales technique in methods like the controversial Neuro-Linguistic Programming of the 1970s.

When invited during our Conductor training with coming up with a ritual for introducing THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience and drawing it to a distinct close, Pam Lewis suggested something she’s used quite a bit in her organizational consulting work in South Africa. Pam invites participants to breathe themselves “into” the circle of participation and then, to demarcate the return to everyday life, to breathe themselves “out” of the circle again. She demonstrated the circular gesture she used to reinforce the direction of breathing, emphasizing breath as our mode of exchange (as it is!) between ourselves and the world around us.

I have enjoyed teaching workshops to teachers and professionals who work with young people with special needs about how to use breath and yoga sequences that specifically either raise energy, focus attention, calm the spirit, or allow us to join with others more smoothly. In their struggle to do what a less-than-adaptive world asks of them, students with special needs, like all of us, can be out of sync with the demands of them.

Think focus, energize, unify as well as calm.

Experiment, and you'll see.

If you start “playing” your breath, you quickly discover that it works a lot like an instrument! Your breath has:

different possibilities for proportions (duration) between inhalations and exhalations
sound and silence (how sounded or noiseless it is–you’ll know what I mean if you sleep next to someone who snores!)
placement in the body (from high in the throat, to middle of the chest, to low in the belly, and even toward the back of the body)
ease and resistance
regularity and erraticness
continuity and stoppage (moments in which you’re neither inhaling nor exhaling)

and

channel, that old “in through the nose and out through the mouth.”

There are other dimensions to breath, of course, as well!

Though I don’t recommend it necessarily, you can give yourself something that mimics aspects of a panic attack by playing with a few of these variables. But you can also go beyond in through the nose, out through the mouth to relax.

Simply by experimenting for yourself with just one of these dimensions of breath, you can bring calm to yourself or to someone else by lengthening the exhalations (even if through the nose), regularizing breathing (offering counted inhales and exhales), or focusing on breathing low into the belly.

The breath is a magnificent instrument for altering our state of being and for connecting us with others, as Pam showed by making breath the centerpiece of her ritual for joining a family prior to taking part in THE HUMAN JOURNEY.

The challenge of using breathing to help others is not what to do with it, but helping people feel comfortable enough socially to deal with its intimate power.

Invite gently.

An intimate experience, THE HUMAN JOURNEY is invitational, never pushing people in difficult circumstances to go beyond their comfort levels (including being as vulnerable as others are evidently willing to be). Rather, it is about creating a space to work with a family or group of people who, possibly stressed, guarded, and isolated from each other, can breathe across the space and find each other again–or perhaps for the first time.

Certification training to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY Experience will enable you to bring families and groups facing grief, serious illness, addiction, and other life transitions together. This tool sets them up to carry what they gained from the experience forward, into listening consistently to each other for values, supporting each other through loss and change from whatever each person’s spiritual perspectives may be, and finding meaning through hard times.

We are doing a limited number of public Conductor Trainings during the year.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

January 20, 2023

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

It’s super fun to watch someone’s thinking shift right in front of you. They might jerk still suddenly, their eyes wide and long, like old cartoon figures in a haunted house or a dark cave, when all you could see was the eyes.

That’s part of the joy of being around children, watching new understandings transform their faces when they’ve discovered not everyone believes the same things about God, or their parents had embarrassing habits when they were kids, or their friends’ parents let them color on the walls.

My teaching has mostly been of adults and I find it especially precious — perhaps because it’s rarer — to watch a big shift in perception happen with adults.

The kinds of shifts adults get seem to be of the fleeting, though recursive, kind. In my own experience, even when I suddenly see things in a wholly fresh way, the recognition might be gone again in an instant, and I’m back (despite my best intentions) in my habitual way of thinking.

And then I get to have the same “revelation” again some years later, in a kind of pleasant Groundhog Day reenactment.

In THE HUMAN JOURNEY (THJ) Conductor Trainings, there’s been one concept around which I’ve been particularly enjoying watching it take place.

Seeing the Big Shift During Conductor Training

That’s when we talk about framing our language and refer to the harder experiences of life not as “bad” nor as a “problem,” but rather as “hard to bear” or “painful.”

The need to start doing this comes up almost immediately in giving participants a THJ Experience, since the first activity for participants involves identifying the conditions into which each was born. Some of the Conditions might at first be universally regarded as tougher to bear – such as having a parent with a mental illness. Some seem on their face universally more pleasant, such as having dinner as a family every night. (Depends, of course.) And some seem more evidently to depend on the meaning the individual ascribes to the condition, being the oldest sibling, for example.

Perhaps “bad” and “painful” sound the same at first, but the distinction matters. When we label an event objectively bad, we resist and harden against it. That of course doesn’t change the event and it may contribute to making it even harder to bear!

But when we label it in terms of its effect on us (“hard to bear,” etc.), we acknowledge our difficulty without resisting what is happening, whether we want it to or not. Doing this may alter our black and white thinking about events, and our point of view at THJ is that it can make harder events actually easier to bear. If we can refrain from ascribing what seem like objective judgments to them, the hardest events of our lives — like watching a loved one die or reckoning with grief — can come with an acknowledgment of the pain involved but without the sense that “this shouldn’t be happening.” It is happening.

Our thinking, as revealed in our language, is so deeply embedded in us, though! THJ Conductor trainees tend to be sensitive souls, seekers of soul and peace and imbued with the desire to share their growth with others. And yet, and yet — it takes them a while before they stop returning to speaking of the hard things of life as “bad” and experience the conceptual leap that makes hard events just hard events, even though they’re painful.

It’s that understanding that we hope will widen participants’ eyes when they go through the toughest life experiences. It’s not that these things don’t happen. They’re not necessarily a “tragedy” and they break our hearts. That distinction may just be the thing that enables us to get through them.

They’re hard. We’ve gotten through hard times before. We just need to remember how.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

June 3, 2022

The Strong, Silent Types Who Go on THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

THE HUMAN JOURNEY® seems like less of a lift at first for women than for men.

It’s a truism that, among our participants, the women of the family, typically the matriarchs, are the ones who get the process of gathering the family to take part in motion: in practice, they tend to be the Conductor’s partner in making it all happen.

So you would think that the women are the ones whom the process really serves.

But is THE HUMAN JOURNEY® really a “woman thing”? Or for people who like talking about feelings in general?

The Guinea Pig Who Wouldn’t Play

Back in the days when the concept for THJ was new, I began testing parts of the design with friends over dinner. Virtually everyone I knew was game to take part, except one good friend, whom I’ll call Ansel.

“You want me to do that feelings game?” he said (I thought somewhat accusingly). “Absolutely not.”

Naturally, I was intrigued. Asking Ansel why not would have been too direct.

So I asked what would be the conditions under which he might agree to take part. I thought about his mother in Philadelphia, who had recently started showing signs of mental changes. Ansel had been making more frequent trips back to check on her.

He hesitated.

So I let it be more specific, “What if your mother were seriously ill and wanted you and your brothers to do this with her? Would you agree then?”

In an instant, the answer was yes.

Matriarchs Rule. AND There are Surprises.

When THJ was ready to play-test with full families, I recruited in houses of worship.

The first volunteer was this birdlike powerhouse of a woman, a stalwart in the Catholic church, who gathered everyone in her family and invited me to Sunday dinner, too.

Seated at the table, it looked as though it was clearly the women’s job to talk to me, as a visitor.

In this southwestern suburb of Chicago, the oldest man of the family, close to 80, and his broad-shouldered stepson-in-law did most of the talking, to each other, through dinner, largely about matters of sports and engineering. This stepfather had fixed an elegant salmon, while his wife — the kind of mother you don’t refuse when she tells you this Sunday dinner a visitor is coming over and you had better do what she says — had prepared the wholesome side dishes, including a crunchy raw broccoli salad. All good brain food. The women made small talk with me.

They hadn’t needed to ask me to dinner in addition to having me over to test THE HUMAN JOURNEY® with them those years ago.

But they were a religious family and hospitality, I guessed, was part of how they did things. We would have dinner and then we would settle into the living room to dig in, to see how the structure of THJ would take a family of a second husband and wife close to 80, her three middle-yeared daughters, two single, one married, and their son-in-law, on a journey of discovery of the ingredients that had formed them prior to birth, the choices they had made in adulthood that had carved out their characters, and the will they had to scythe out a new path into a shared future.

Why were the four women slack-jawed by the time the evening was over?

Did it have anything to do with what the laconic octagenerian — perhaps not one for therapy, long intimate talks with his wife or stepdaughters, or extended out-loud reflections — was sharing?

How, when he was grieving his first wife, still having to go to work each day in the greeting-card shop he owned, he was able to heal by helping others select the right card and, at the register, to be a patient listener to the tales of love, relationship, and, occasionally, loss they wanted to share with him?

Or was it the how he was sharing it, seemingly without concern for the time he was taking, the personal discoveries he was making, or the rapt engagement of his family?

The structure of THJ, the ground rules of the experience, and the presence of an outside “Conductor” — a stranger to him — of the Journey opened out the way for him, I was guessing — and for his family. I suspected there would be further questions posed to him as he and his wife got ready for bed that night or as he and his stepdaughters cleared the table together the following Sunday evening.

That Sunday night was the beginning of a new way for the family to see him and each other, the start of new questions and fresh answers, and a different way of walking together on THE HUMAN JOURNEY®.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

May 4, 2022

What Can Still Happen After 45 Years of Marriage (Keep Listening!)

It’s stunning, what creating a special time, place, and occasion can do to help people focus.

In the held space of a THJ Experience, participants seem primed to pay particular attention. A single line can shine a prism on the whole world of a relationship — and, for that very reason, it can also contain new light for that relationship. In THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience, a few words can just pop out. In an instant, everyone recognizes that’s “it,” the roadmap ahead for the relationship, even in a present that feels completely in flux.

I once read we have a likelihood only slightly better than chance of predicting correctly what our family members might say in a new situation. The Newlywed Game, that popular television game show that ran on and off for more than 50 years, made much of this. It turns out married couples are not intimate enough to know just about everything about their spouse! On the show, sometimes they did, and — very often — they didn’t.

And that may not improve much over time. It’s a shock to discover that the person you thought you knew — that very common phrase among spouses who are contemplating or have been asked for a divorce — makes decisions on a very different basis than you thought possible, after one year together, 10, or 50.

Or that the child who came out of your very body, who seemed outwardly to reject every religious value you’d tried so hard to teach him, actually has an inner life that, to your surprise, sounds rather like your own.

But with THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, a profound understanding of what makes a family member tick comes out — the inner life that they never realized you didn’t know, or had perhaps thought you’d never accept.

And the benefit that understanding confers for the family as whole is a lasting one. You hear them afresh – and can re-commit to them to sustain hard times.

THE HUMAN JOURNEY® with a Family in the Pandemic’s Flux

Mary and Edward had been married 45 years when they, along with Nick and Patty, their older son and daughter-in-law, and their daughter Andrea, who was returning in her 30s to college, sat down with our Conductor to participate in THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, perhaps skeptical that they might gain anything that might help them grow as a family in 2020.

Pandemic conditions made it not an easy time for anyone. Mary had lost her job as an administrator at a local law firm; Edward was unused to the impingement on his privacy as his rather-older-than-traditional-college-aged daughter returned home to pursue her coursework via Zoom. Finally, Edward felt, the kids had flown the nest and he was able to spread out his computer- and gadget-assembly hobbies in her former bedroom; with Andrea’s return, he felt he had one more woman in the house judging how he spent his downtime.

And all were worried about Mary’s mother, in her late 80s, living a thousand miles away. Though Natalie was a feisty, spirited woman, they weren’t going to be able to check in on her till a vaccine would come out if they wanted to keep her safe, much less themselves.

On some level, Mary and Edward’s marriage was traditional. If they disagreed, he would do something that put her down, more or less subtly. Rather than suffer further humiliation, Mary would back away and withdraw into herself. Edward would lord his triumph over her. The pattern made both kids, Nick and Andrea, sick.

“I Thought I Knew What You Meant, and Then I Stopped Listening”

In THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, participants share, in a variety of ways, how their lives have taken shape. At a critical moment in the THJ Experience, each person hears another participant’s reflection about the meaning of one of those sharings for her.

It was Edward’s turn to reflect for Mary. It won’t surprise you that Edward was unable to reflect on Mary’s experience on her own terms. Instead, he had “phoned in” his listening. But THE HUMAN JOURNEY’s structure allowed Mary to define her own experience.

Our Conductor told us what happened: “Mary let Edward know, as politely as she could, that, while his sense of her feeling was correct, his idea about its meaning was not. She was standing up for herself. He had listened selectively, highlighting familiar parts of her family history without picking up on a very painful insight that working with the prompt had elicited for her.”

The “kids” were astonished hearing their mother stand up for herself … and by what their father said next.

The One-Liner That Told the Whole Story

The line told the whole story. How easy it is to treat one’s longtime spouse as finished goods. To go to sleep on the relationship itself, especially in a marriage 45 years in the making. To imagine the future as simply an extension of the past.

In THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, the joyful, connected future we move groups toward is not necessarily a predictable extension of the past. Rather, it is a future of their highest intentions. It acknowledges where they have been while structuring their growing commitments for the future.

How beneficial for families who somehow have been unable to hold a vision of the future in which:

They can still be strong as a unit, even without their beloved parent.

They can support their family member in recovery with actions that help on his terms rather than enable him; or

They reckon with a life-altering change in their mobility or memory to design a future that can hold it all, both the more and the less pleasant.

Join us to provide this transformational experience for families undergoing transition and loss. You’ll bring them a deeper sense of commitment and increased ability to weather the life’s changes.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

April 6, 2022

When the Child Gets the Grown-Ups’ Act Together

Painting by Alice Pike Barney, n.d.

The Child Gets the Adults Into Shape

Eleven-year-old Oliver had seen it all: the terse words exchanged by his mother and his adult stepbrother Lucas, who seemed to haplessly back himself into one fix after another.

There were the experiments with drugs, though thankfully nothing too serious at this point.

The fathering of a baby with a young woman who didn’t seem to know all she was getting into.

A series of challenges in launching into a career that held any promise.

Oliver had caught way more than the adults thought he was capable of.

He’d also watched his mother’s teenage natural son, James, the one she’d brought with her into the marriage to Oliver’s father.

James never bothered to conceal his irritation with his stepbrother’s shenanigans. James had sometimes told Oliver that, had Lucas been his mother’s full child, she would have prevented this kind of behavior from ever having had a chance to develop.

Oliver had had it better than either of his half-siblings had. At least he was living with both his parents and, though they may have issues with other members of their blended family, everyone was crazy for him.

Can I Play, Too?

When our Conductor invited the adult members of this family to participate in THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, Oliver asked whether he could participate, too. She considered the question: the THJ Experience was designed with adults and mature adolescents more in mind. Oliver was only 11.

On the other hand, he was clearly an “old soul,” observant, wise, and engaged. So she agreed, curious how an 11-year-old would take on the THJ Experience. And, she reasoned, he’d always have the freedom to duck out if he got bored or sleepy or would rather read in his room.

But Oliver didn’t duck out, he stayed. And, though she offered her help, he didn’t need any more guidance than the adults. Indeed, Oliver participated fully in THE HUMAN JOURNEY® almost to the end, when sleepiness overtook him.

But, just as you may have done when your parents were involved in something juicy, he stayed awake in his bedroom and craned his ears to listen in to the voices of his parents and half-siblings. He heard the sharing, the relieved laughter, and the descending tones that come into adults’ voices when they’re starting to wrap up an encounter.

So he knew exactly when the closing of the THJ Experience was rolling into motion, and he padded back into the middle of it to be able to wrap up with the rest of his family.

A Promise That Goes on the Fridge

Although he was the only one in bare feet, he engaged as seriously as the rest in forming the commitments to others in his family that would take them into a clearer and closer future together. And he was elated, as the family envisioned a richer, more positive future together, when his half-brother, Lucas, who had been struggling to show up for others in the family, committed to spending regular time each week with his “little guy.”

We’ve been learning some things recently from Oliver and from some other very young people taking part in THE HUMAN JOURNEY®—and that is, first, that many of them can handle it!

And that their presence has a positive effect on the adults. Adults as well as children experience challenges paying attention; they too can start suddenly itching for a snack. The children who can stay with it inspire the adults, too.

Children With Wrinkles

I sometimes call adults “children with wrinkles.” The THJ Conductor saw that Oliver’s presence changed everything for the older members of his family. Children need us to be responsible, thoughtful, and open-hearted. They expect us to keep our promises. Oliver’s presence pressed Lucas into behaving as a full adult perhaps because he knew what his little half-brother needed of him.

It’s one thing to say something to another person in private, one on one. It’s quite another to make a vow to another in the presence of others. (That’s one reason that wedding ceremonies and certain legal documents have witnesses.) Lucas’s promise to Oliver is held by the entire family in THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Experience.

You don’t have to have a wise child around to have a successful THJ Experience! The THJ Conductor, though a “child with wrinkles,” performs similar function as the child in helping everyone toward their highest selves. At a moment of family stress, such as when anticipating a loss or making sense of sudden change, the Conductor holds the space that brings everyone in the party both the wisdom and the high expectations of a child.

Join us to provide this transformational experience for families undergoing transition and loss. You’ll bring them a deeper sense of commitment and increased ability to weather the life’s changes.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

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.

February 25, 2021

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.

January 12, 2021

How Will You Know That Tool is Actually On Your Belt?

There's a way a tool feels when it shapes to your intention.

I’m in a hurry.

On the rare occasions I actually cook something, I want to know there will be a meal at some point. (This is especially true since my cooking motions are unpracticed and it takes me twice as long as the recipe predicts!)

When I’m training helping professionals, I want to know they’ll come away with something that can fundamentally change how they serve others, something that will multiply the impact of what I bring them.

The people who sign up to become Conductors of THE HUMAN JOURNEY® are like this, too.

They tend also to be busy professional people — with credentials in social work, counseling, divinity, nursing, care management, and other fields focused on the service of others. Like us, they’re concerned about the amount of loss, grief, confusion, and alienation they’re seeing in their work, which has been growing exponentially in this past year.

They’re motivated by making a difference.

They’re not going to learn to do that by only sitting and staring at a series of slides. They don’t have time to “learn” another tool that’s going to sit on a shelf or in a drawer.

The pandemic changed how we teach — for the better.

Occasioned by the pandemic, our movement not only to an online training modality but also to a three-session training format — one that gets Conductors up and running right away and then keeps refining their skills — has been game-changing.

With the Conductor’s Kits shipped and the Conductor’s Guidebooks made available in advance, and a scaffolded process by which our trainees actually get to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY® twice during the two interstitial weeks of our training, our new training format has turned out to be exactly the right way to get people up and running in their settings — whether they be senior living, recovery centers, hospices, congregational settings, therapists’ offices, or social service settings.

They get specific coaching on what they actually did during those two Journeys.

And we’re improving our model even more for 2021.

We’ve added a one-month-out, private session with me — THJ’s inventor and founder — that allows you, once you’ve started implementing THJ on a regular basis, to identify where your own questions, triumphs, and growth edges are. It’s like having a custom toolbelt sized for you and your practice context.

We’d love to suit you up and ensure you grow your capacity to help groups and families. Consider joining a growing body of those using THE HUMAN JOURNEY® to support those at points of crisis or inflection in their lives.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

December 1, 2020

THJ Spills the Beans

It’s time to answer a question we get a lot about THE HUMAN JOURNEY®, especially when we tell people they can think of it as a work of “applied theatre.”

Oh! (People say.)
Do people play characters then?
Is it like role-play?

In a word (five, really, but I’ve got the British on my mind), it’s actually just the opposite.

THE HUMAN JOURNEY® carefully invites people to remove their masks — especially the ones they had forgotten they were wearing and the ones others have placed on their faces for them.

For a couple of hours that have lasting impact, it frees fathers of the father role, enabling sons to see their fathers as fallible, flawed men, freed of the burden of responsibility for them, and equally desiring of love and happiness as they navigate the challenges unique to their time and path.

For a couple of hours, it frees siblings of their stolid roles within the family structure, cleaning the windows through which they are viewed.

The masks drop – not because anyone explicitly asks for them to (you really think they would if they did?), but because of its facilitation methodology and THJ’s® play structure—and the Conductor role itself, the only real role in THE HUMAN JOURNEY®.

Left to their own devices, the participants’ roles — their masks — might further congeal and ossify.

So over our eight hours together, we train Conductors to do specific things that hold safe space for groups, to soften the family dynamic—treating

patient and family members as on an equal footing, equally deserving of attention;
everyone as people with histories that are equally fresh, histories they can re-see and represent for themselves in the presence of an outsider; and
generations and conditions of life as givens, not as calls for praise or blame.

In laying the function of holding down the role to our THJ® Conductors, we allow family members’ masks to melt – and for each one to see him or herself in something truer than a mirror: each other’s naked eyes.

November 24, 2020

That’s Some Bad Gr(Attitude)!

“I didn’t ask for a year like this has been. Why would I have?”
“You know what? I’d trade a boring life for this kind of grief anytime.”
“You’re telling me to be grateful at a time like this?”

I gotta tell you, I hate that exercise at the Thanksgiving when they go around and everyone has to say what they’re grateful for. Ugh! It’s like a gray-scale version of being suddenly locked in a squeeze with a too-desperate stranger at a conference get-to-know-you exercise and having them demand, “Say you love me. Say it like you mean it.” (Can you tell I’ve been there?)

And in a year in which so many families have experienced hardship and loss, it can be particularly wrenching to reach for any sense of gratitude, much less gratitude that has to be expressed, potentially in front of friends of friends, and over Zoom.

But THE HUMAN JOURNEY® gives me a tool for this, especially since it’s designed to help families joined by biology, choice, or mutual support to start to see the current “challenge of their lives” as ones they can not only get through, but rely on each other during. The THJ Experience does that by literally giving participants an experience of everything in their lives up to this point being something that has been given them — not just the “good” things, but everything. Maybe some things are easier to bear than others, but those things are no more gifts than the things that are a bear … to bear. Everything is a gift.

This is not a view specific to any one religion by any means. Rather, in the THJ Experience, you’re free to bring whatever belief you have. Maybe you believe that there is a Giver who has your ultimate best interests at heart. Maybe you believe that an impersonal universe provides. Or maybe you just believe that you’re standing at the door with a package in your hands; the UPS, or Fed Ex, or postal representative is nowhere to be seen; and there’s no return address (and certainly no returns).

And now the package is yours.

It’s still a gift.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

June 22, 2020

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.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

So, Who’s the Father?

March 18, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

The Creature Comforts Checklist

This is it our “Creature Comforts Checklist.” It’s an odd name, we know.

When you’re grieving, you miss the physical presence of the person you lost …

February 28, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

Beyond “In Through the Nose, Out Through the Mouth”

February 7, 2023 No Comments

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works

How Can Something Be Neither Good Nor Bad?

January 20, 2023 No Comments

Healing

Becoming the Witness

January 10, 2023 No Comments

February 23, 2020

The Smile of the Mona Gloria

The cutting board, the yardstick, the stacks—in all, it was 33 lovingly packaged boxes. On this May, 2019 day, she took the greatest pride in assembling the original set of THE HUMAN JOURNEY®’s Conductor Kits, now used in an updated form in institutional and public trainings to help families cultivate belonging and meaning in the heart of change.

Perhaps it was such pride that put a smile more beatific than any I’ve ever seen on Gloria’s face.

No matter my pushing, Gloria refuses the title of Production Manager, preferring Production Assistant, even though it often seems she was born to make the physical universe work. Yet the eight person-hours of measuring, folding, assembling, and tying up of the THJ® boxes with the decks, board, and implements on this particular day are only an external sign of what she’s done for THE HUMAN JOURNEY®.

Gloria’s real title is that of godmother to THE HUMAN JOURNEY®. When, in 2013, I started putting together the point of view that would later underpin THJ®, Gloria was the one I talked it all over with. Back then, I was looking for the model I could best believe in for how people told the story of difficult times in their lives—an explanatory framework that gave meaning to the hard times, more than simply an opportunity to rehearse a story one has already told a thousand times. A framework that could be a journey of discovery both for the person as they told their story and for those who received it.

For some months, we talked through “narrative frameworks,” as I then called them, starting with a crucial dinner at the Tong’s Tiki Hut restaurant near her home. I was ranking and testing a catalog I had formed of them. You may recognize the one whose handle was “I’m right and he’s an idiot (right?)” (This was the self-justification narrative, one you’ll recognize if you’ve ever listened to a friend in pain shortly after a breakup.)

Another was what I’ve viewed as the a-bit-too-facile framework that somehow hard times are paired with their redemptive elements (the “silver lining framework”). Gloria thought about it and added two more, including the notion that hard experiences could be regarded as experiments in living, possibly even experiments that a higher power might be conducting with human beings as subjects.

In the end, the one that made the most sense, and later became THE HUMAN JOURNEY®’s vehicle of both personal and communal healing in times of impending loss, or other opportunity for a group to grow in the face of change, was none of these. (Ask if you’re curious, or for directions to the Tiki Hut.)

Nowadays, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Conductor’s Kits are no longer in cardboard boxes, held together with a colored bow. They’re packaged in solid tin boxes, nested tight inside with the game boards, wooden Meeples implements, and the three THJ® decks. One THJ® Conductor trainee recently described the process of opening her box as being like a “sacred ritual.”

So was the putting them together for a dear friend of the business. With gratitude for all Gloria has brought to THE HUMAN JOURNEY® and for her beatific smile!

The Possibility of Multiples

So, who's the best daddy in THE HUMAN JOURNEY?

“The child is the father of the man”

Any more daddies?

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