Spirituality – THE HUMAN JOURNEY®

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 if you’d like 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.

A stylized portrait of the Founding Fathers at Mount Rushmore

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

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.

How THE HUMAN JOURNEY® works