Spirituality Archives - THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

September 29, 2023

The Chaplain’s Feet

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

THE HUMAN JOURNEY® Conductor

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.

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

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

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

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

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

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

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

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

Grief on the Comedy Stage

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

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Anxiety explained visually by illustrator-social worker Lindsay Braman.

Activities & Tools

If You’re a Pro, You Gotta Have a Pro

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

June 7, 2023 No Comments

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March 10, 2023

Ostranenie: A Fantastic Russian Word

Learn to pronounce ostranenie and impress your friends with your accent as well as with this cool word.

And what a concept … to learn to re-see, as if with new eyes, those things our eyes think they know so well, they no longer see them at all.

To find wonder again and again in the way our sister-in-law calls company in for dinner without the least hint of anxiety, exhaustion, or sense of the extraordinary event.

To learn anew about the people we think we know best.

A woman runs away from home to find home

A trope of the last two generations is a woman — economically more self-sufficient than in prior decades — leaving her marriage to “find herself” for the first time.

Perhaps she had never lived alone.

Perhaps she was raised by parents who themselves had subscribed to earlier ideas about gender roles, had prepared her, whether consciously or, more likely, because “it was in the water,” to put her needs second to those of her husband and children. She was drowning in meeting others’ needs.

Recently, the New York Times put its finger on a different kind of relationship crisis: so much physical and psychical togetherness that, again, it became hard for a married woman to find herself. The story suggested that apparently, again, led more by women than by men, a movement to live apart while remaining married and in an expressly loving relationship had a discernible uptick in 2021.

The “living apart together” trend had already been noticed by demographers with relation to older people who had been divorced or widowed, wanted to be in a relationship, but preferred to maintain independent households.

Between 2000 and 2019, the proportion of married couples who lived apart grew by 25%. And it began to rise again in 2021, possibly (the Times speculates) because of the pandemic and its concomitant rise in caregiving and schooling demands, alongside work, on wives and mothers.

The women the story profiled decided to live temporarily, and while remaining in contact with their husbands, in their own places, as one said, “remember[ing] who I am by myself, remember[ing] what I like doing by myself.”

Seeing the whole picture that has you in it

The two versions of women leaving home differ in clear ways.

One version is permanent, aims to sever relationship and the old sense of home; the other is temporary, maintains relationship, and includes a return. Its success as an experiment depends on ostranenie, remembering oneself, while being able to see anew both a loved one, and one’s relationship to (in these cases) him. It becomes urgent when your habitual ways of seeing and relating have obscured the emergent reality of the human being you live with.

How do you embrace and continue to commit to a picture unless you can see it first, and then keep seeing it as it changes?

The phenomenon of living apart together is of course only available to those who can make an expensive arrangement work economically. And not everybody has to move out to see their family member as if for the first time — an experience of ostranenie that can feel like permission for that person to be themselves and to keep on growing.

Valuing the commitment to allow the other person to continue to grow, and for roles to evolve and change, you need a jolt so that you can see the person you’ve seen 1,002 times, the 1,003^rd time as if for the first.

Despite what they think, people don't already know.

Professionally, when you work with your clients, patients, or congregants, their families, and with the support groups you lead, you are continually working against their belief they already know who everyone else in the group is, that their existing judgments are true now and forever.

Powerful experiences work much more effectively and lastingly than mere verbal reminders.

When offered as an experience for families or groups dealing with serious illness, loss, or a life change such as the recognition of the need to recover from addiction, THE HUMAN JOURNEY actively moves participants into a state of ostranenie, both with respect to every other person in the group and — perhaps even more significantly — with themselves.

No, they don’t end up a freaked-out mess, not recognizing anyone and shattering into 1,000 shards! They see the vulnerability and fragility of each other person, the ways in which they are creating themselves in every moment. And they release a fixed sense of themselves in the process.

Thus, when they find home again, it is the one that grants the freedom to every other grieving, or struggling, or growing participant—to be who they are. And the group support they find there is offered to the person they are becoming, day by day.

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 in 2023. Register here to be included. We limit spaces to allow for personal attention and mentoring.

May today be a day of seeing as if for the first time.

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

Grief on the Comedy Stage

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

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June 7, 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.

February 14, 2021

Which part of the groove you want them in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us to learn to conduct THE HUMAN JOURNEY®.

February 14, 2021

How to be hospitable without guests

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

The front door isn’t exactly open. But recently I’ve noticed something different in the public sphere, and it’s made me think about a broader form of hospitality.

Many more public figures I follow on social media are offering well wishes as the sacred holidays of others come up – in the terms that those groups would use for themselves, rather than as awkward outsiders.

A state governor, with almost 200,000 Twitter followers, wished “Eid Mubarak!” in late July in honor of the Muslims he serves. He is Jewish.

Another public official, who is Christian, included his millions of followers in offering “blessings of light, goodness, and prosperity” on the dawn of the Hindu holiday Diwali, which celebrates the triumph of light over darkness. (You may note the similarity in the celebration of light with holidays in other traditions.)

A former public official, now a popular pundit, made light play of Hanukkah, a Jewish holiday, in a way that expressed affection for its traditions. His parents are Sikh and Hindu.

Even as more and more of us claim multiple cultures as our own, many of us too were raised in families that celebrated specific holidays, not some sort of generic or multiple “happy holidays.” And all it takes to call members of a culture by the names they would give themselves, and the general shape their religious or cultural lives take, is a few minutes on Google.

Indeed, even though we may sometimes get it wrong, we stand to learn some of the most important things about the other person we possibly could.

With culturally appropriate wishes that refrain from otherizing those you encounter, and in much less time than it takes to clean the house and prepare a spread for 20 of your closest friends—you’ve laid out the red carpet for others and made the world a safer and more welcoming place to be human – in the so-particular way in which each of us is.

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

Grief on the Comedy Stage

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

If You’re a Pro, You Gotta Have a Pro

June 7, 2023 No Comments

February 14, 2021

Who wants to be self-righteous?

One of the (gulp) many books I’ve wished I’d written myself is a little book of thought experiments called Astonish Yourself! by Roger-Pol Droit, whose playful activities expand our perception beyond the habitual.

In a period in which many of us are all too familiar with the four walls around us and maybe could use a little jostling of our perceptions, I thought you might enjoy playing, too, with a new thought experiment I sprang on the participants during a half-day PD workshop I just conducted for the National Association of Social Workers in Wisconsin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The List

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

Debrief

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

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

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

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

And two of those burning cheeks were mine.

End of Life

The Incredible Will to Sing

November 9, 2023 No Comments

Healing

The Chaplain’s Feet

September 29, 2023 No Comments

Group Dynamics

A Vaccine for Loneliness?

August 4, 2023 No Comments

Culture

Grief on the Comedy Stage

July 14, 2023 No Comments

Activities & Tools

If You’re a Pro, You Gotta Have a Pro

June 7, 2023 No Comments

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.

End of Life

So what’s a “movement chaplain”?

But the dancer image is also not far off.

Being Human — With Other Humans

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A woman runs away from home to find home

Seeing the whole picture that has you in it

Despite what they think, people don't already know.

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The List

Debrief

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