Kissing The Bull

My client hesitated at the door before leaving. “So, this is feeling stuff is supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

I put a hand on her shoulder and sighed. “Yes. It will.”

Image: CarleMuseum.org

The trials of meeting our inner monsters: I couldn’t bear to tell her that it would be like riding a rank bull and getting thrown a few times. Or staying on only to have your face meet the bull's head, termed "kissing the bull." I wanted to tell her it would hurt like Hell, but it would be worth it. Down the road her heart would expand, and she would feel more keenly connected to the whole human race. She would forgive more quickly, love more deeply and experience radiant joy. (Disclaimer: I don't know if this is true for bull riders.)

Counseling is an art with diverging theories and myriad techniques. (If only people knew!) And, good news, it works! (At least, most of the time). A lot of what goes on cannot be measured. The aspects that can be measured are occasionally not what make counseling effective, but numbers please the funders and universities.

A universal understanding in the field is that after developing a trusting bond, we ask a client to acknowledge and feel his/her feelings, which ultimately helps the client process them. By feeling and processing, emotions shift and release hold of us. But if someone is accustomed to thinking their way through life, they will be in for a rough ride initially. Often clients assume that in counseling we are going to spread out their life on a table, like puzzle pieces, hold our chins and analyze it. When they are asked to be vulnerable and stay with their heart, it is not easy. And, if I ask my clients to stay with their hearts, I have to do it too. I have to walk the ego’s fire, trusting that my spirit will overrule.

Part of the trouble is, in terms of feelings, we are a constipated culture. We’ll do almost anything to talk ourselves out of them. Here’s what I know about feelings: If you ignore them, they will show up at

Too close for comfort. Too sick to love.

Dedicated to Newton and Sandy Hook

A tragedy like that which occurred on Friday 12/14/12 in Connecticut where 20 children and 7 adults died rivets a nation in its tracks. No one is left untouched or unscathed. Our hearts are broken as we scan the children's photos. We are left to wonder: "Why?!" I grew up spending every other Christmas with Uncle Steve and Aunt Helen (and brood) in Sandy Hook, CT. Before contemplating what happened from a mostly Jungian perspective, I will share that the only postcard on my refrigerator on 9/11/2001 was a picture of the Towers with a blurred seagull in the foreground. I was moving to a new home and had removed everything else from the refrigerator door. My sister had been visiting New York and inside the Towers the week before the living nightmare. I was affected by Colorado incidents as well. When I was living in Florida and anticipating a move to Colorado, my favorite neighborhood was Ken Caryl. Had there been a single home for sale in there, our kids would have attended Columbine. And JonBenet Ramsey was my oldest daughter's age and when we arrived in Boulder, Bella made friends who had known the dear child. Finally Liz was at the midnight Batman premier in Boulder while only 45 minutes away in Aurora people were being murdered at the same event. Too close for comfort.


Ironically I begin my Christmas letter (that I wrote weeks ago) saying that this holiday I am sensing a festive spirit and connectedness – a reaching out – combined with an Angst, a feeling that at any minute everything could come crashing down. And, for some this week, it did. Here’s what I think: We all know that joy will not be found in a perfume, in a new car, a raise, a vacation, a ring, your partner or new shoes. But, on the other hand, how do we connect more deeply with everyone around us? Do we see the cashier at Safeway as sacred? Do we see the person who just cut us off as sacred? (Okay, okay, I use that one repeatedly, because that is a particular challenge for me having grown up in LA where driving is a constant race to win).

Reverend Carlton Pearson

It’s our exclusionary society that is destroying us (and I know I'm judging judgement so I will work on that). It’s why I chose not to join any formally organized college groups and why I left organized religion. Just by its very nature a group with specific rules requires there to be outsiders and insiders. There’s a feeling of “us” vs. “them.” It is tribal thinking and other than Reverend Carlton Pearson (featured this week on This American Life) most groups choose individuals exactly like themselves to be in the group. Reverend Pearson lost his congregation because he realized it's HUMANS who create Hell. He advocates a "doctrine of inclusion." On the same token, I don’t judge people who choose to be a part of a club or church, because they are deriving community and support and often coming together to do a lot of good. What I’m proposing is that there might be no rules to love and loving. If a religious individual comes to my door with the intent to convert me, their judgment is implied. If I can't join a group because I'm white (haha), there is judgment. If a religious person comes to my door asking what kind of support do I need and they are offering it without intent to convert, than that is the love and connection that will save.

How can we love our neighbors, the strangers with whom we engage, our family members more fully? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that these horrific acts are not only serious mental illness manifest (and the mentally ill do not receive enough funding since the Reagan administration) but also an expression of the darkest part of each of us. It is a reflection of the way we turn our head and look the other way; of the way we attach strings and withhold love. We exclude, we lie, we think it’s someone else’s problem. They are the sick ones. Not me. 

When I was mentally ill (at least I have the illusion I am well now ;), I was too absorbed in my inability to crawl out of a hole to look around me, to care what was going on, to help others. There are so many who need our help, but we must begin at home. Killers will always find weapons (although we could make them far less available!), but by healing the projection of our hidden darkness – by looking within and taking responsibility for any anger, any pettiness, any place we are too sick to love – we will be a part of a world that is changing for the better.

Dr. John Sarno: A Medical Pioneer

Dr. John Sarno

Last month an article in Forbes by Edward Siedle, “How America’s Best Pain Doctor Took on the Medical Community – and Won” (see link below) featured my favorite chronic pain mind/body specialist, Dr. John Sarno. Sarno’s innovative treatment could only have been accepted because he put a distinguished career on the line. He possessed the expertise to back up his claims. Essentially, he was disgusted by the way the medical community took advantage of chronic pain clients, or clients with the mysterious fibromyalgia. He asserted that the way peers treated pain was “gross malpractice, generally practiced.” 

It’s not that his theory required clients to spend years in therapy. To the contrary, Siedle explains: “Sarno’s brilliant insight was that by making the conscious mind of the patient aware that his unconscious was creating the pain to serve as a powerful distraction from deeply troubling, emotionally painful issues, the patient’s pain would cease to be an effective distraction and would eventually go away.” He wouldn’t be so popular if his revolutionary approach didn’t work so effectively on people who had been around the globe (or at least their city) seeking answers to their hellish existence.

Image: ABC News

The way I describe it, based on my own experience, is like... a Twinkie (I heard Hostess is going out of business – how is that possible?). Some of us use sadness to shield an angry core, and some of us do the opposite: we become angry more easily to shield a vulnerable and grief-stricken core. If you are willing to get to the cream in the Twinkie and to acknowledge the feelings there, so much gets freed up. It’s like getting your life back - a little messier, but better for it.  However, it’s painful to feel those deeper feelings and we spend a lifetime finding ways to distract and defend against them, as though we’ll die if we go there. What we discover is that we don’t die. We learn to do the Buddhist thing and “sit with the feelings,” and, almost magically, we discover that they release. Feelings don’t fester unless they are repressed or suppressed. Feelings WANT to process out of us. Learning to feel to the depth of our being is a practice, and, as we get good at it, feelings pass through more fluidly.

Go to the place you are afraid to go. Some people are truly suffering with an undiagnosed ailment, but I knew of a woman in wheelchair for months with severe back pain who was out within a week after seeing Dr. Sarno. Another wise soul who offers tools to manage feelings is Dr. Laurel Mellin. I recommend her books: The Pathway: Follow the Road to Health and Happiness or The Solution.

People are too busy to feel, and the body eventually slows them down. Instead of running from doctor to doctor and quitting all of the activity you love to do (which, ironically, will only make the pain worse because you will resent it), what if you were told that all you had to do was to feel? Could you do it?

Image: Betty Matteson Rhodes

While I am deeply grateful to Western medicine for the advances in treating serious illnesses, and I believe that most doctors make their patients’ well being and health top priority, sometimes old ideas are perpetuated. Like teachers, doctors are often expected to do too much in too little time. But some just don't want to lose money or take the time and effort to change tracks. Siedle writes: “The good news: Sarno had developed an alternative approach to treating pain that was immensely more successful (and cheaper) than the radical, costly conventional procedures of the day. The bad news: doctors whom he relied upon for referrals enjoyed the revenues related to conventional treatments they administered and would rarely send their patients to him.” Even well meaning alternative practitioners want to find an answer, and unless they incorporate a psycho-emotional component into their work, they are likely to mistakenly attribute the ailments to physical or structural abnormalities.

Fortunately, Dr. Sarno has succeeded in spite of resistance. And, the people whom he has healed celebrate his name and theories. One day he will receive the credit that is due him.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsiedle/2012/11/28/how-americas-best-pain-doctor-took-on-the-medical-establishment-and-won/

Love Lasik

Baby bird in Niwot, CO

Dance transformed me into a more open-hearted woman. Becoming a counselor is yet another quest to chase out the places where I am afraid of intimacy. Witnessing (and urging) another person into the terrifying territory of feelings has required that I be equally brave.

Being open-hearted sounds either medical or perhaps like what follows will be Hallmark sentimentality. Sure, I’m now a big mush-ball when it comes to the people whom I love, but recently, my new understanding has been like Lasik surgery to the heart. Lasik permanently changes the shape of the cornea. In the same way, what I need to do to love more fully has become clear, and my heart and self are permanently altered.

Rainbow over Niwot, CO

Why is intimacy terrifying? (Counselors ask a lot of questions.) Being “burned” makes it less enticing to jump back into the water. And I’m not just talking about the relationship between couples. It applies to the connection with our parents, children, extended family and friends. We throw daggers between ourselves and others just to keep them back. Like some fake watch salesman on a NYC street corner, we hide the daggers inside special pockets of our coat – just in case someone gets too close.

Niwot, CO

  How do we do it? We judge. The other
  is too slow, too uncultured, too smart,
  too shut down, too fat, too emotional,
  too unemotional... the list goes on. Our
  egos convince us that it’s super
  important that we teach the other person
  a lesson (even if the person will learn whatever they are supposed to
  learn in their own way, on their own time). Or we argue politics
  when in fact our tantrum may have to do with poor early attachment
  to a parent. Or we hold strings to the money or time that we give. (I
  was there for you; therefore, you should be here for me now.) Or, we judge based on another’s appearance or seeming difference. And we are equally harsh on ourselves.

Captured on a visit to my sister and family

Our only job is to love... and that requires that we become bigger than ourselves, entering possibly unknown territory. When we love we set ourselves and the other free. Our egos, pesky little buggers, have the power to convince us that if we don’t do what they tell us to do everything will fall apart. And if everything falls apart, we will have no control, and then it will be our fault that the world ends because someone didn’t load the dishwasher correctly.

In NYC with my girls

  We live in an angry
  culture, and it’s not just
  road rage. Yesterday I
  saw a father walk up to
  his teenage son in the
  airport and twist his
  arm so hard I thought the boy would cry out. Love, and the healing of the
  world, begins at home. Undoing the fear of love begins at home. Where do
  you throw daggers to keep people back? Who do you need to manage so
  you will look better? Will you need to wait until you are dying to decide that
  love is really worth the pain?

LASIK is a surgical procedure intended to reduce a person's dependency on glasses or contact lenses. LOVE is a radical choice intended to reduce a person's dependency on the illusion of separation.

Where the Light Leads

I really like being in a body!  Lemon bars and enchiladas; ripe figs and Honey Crisp apples; stroking the soft coats of my big gray cats, the pink and orange of winter sunrises; the snug feel of suede half chaps and galloping pony along the back roads; slow kissing and the smell of roses; music, "This American Life" and crunching through dry fallen leaves; the little birds and plump squirrels more visible in the bare trees, the feeling in my heart on Christmas morning, my daughter’s faces… When I take time to dwell in my senses – to appreciate the detail of the world around me - I feel so alive and grateful. Knowing that my range of movement will someday be restricted inspires me to dance to capacity, to fill out space and be present every second to the process – the connection between hundredths of seconds: to be inside the movement and watching it at the same time. Anything can be done with deeper presence: cooking, sex, biking to work, massaging a friend's back or listening to our kids. Lately, I am most aware of my body while dancing - celebrating how much the collage of muscles, veins, bones, organs do all in a day.

Working with the newly bereaved through Hospice Care has only increased my sense of feeling blessed, but, too, it has confronted me with questions like: Who will be with me when I die? Who will be around to help me through it? Some of these people have lost partners who’ve been with them almost 50 years. They didn’t bargain for going it alone, and it breaks my heart to watch them grasp for hope in the confusion of grief.

  

Sure, I’ve listened to Death Cab for Cutie’s song, “What Sarah Said” that ends: “So, who’s going to watch you die?” many times, but witnessing people who have just lost their "other half" face these bigger questions, I am compelled to do the same. People can’t just drop everything, and sometimes it’s the people who we least expect who come through during hard times… or even, in the end.

Some spiritual folk say that the reason spirits hang around is because death is not that big of a transition and the spirits occasionally need guidance towards the light. Not knowing where the light will lead, sometimes it’s more comforting to remain in the attic of the beautiful home they had built. "They" suggest that when a person dies we say: “Your spirit just left your body. Go look for Aunt Shoshana” (or whomever they know who has already crossed over). Otherwise the person might hang around wondering why no one is speaking to them. I've also heard it said that death is a continuation of how we live and maybe if we die with presence, we won't need anyone pointing us to the light.

I wonder what it will feel like to dance on the other side. But, for now, I really like being in this body!

photo: Eliza Karlson