I was at Anastasia State Park this morning, braving the heat, and several times, I was fortunate to see giant swallowtails alight close by me, before flying off into the distance.
As I walked, I was thinking about the concept of sanctuary, what this means, and if it can be cultivated and created.
I left Alachua, close to Gainesville, in north Florida, a few days ago, after completing a five day program run by the Florida Societyfor Bio-energetic Analysis. The theme, no surprise, was on opening up to love. After spending a profoundly intimate experience with twelve other participants and two trainers, I rented a car and drove to St. Augustine, to process, relax and spend time on the ocean.
The program in Alachua was dedicated to the memory of FrankHladky, MD. I admit that I never heard of Dr Hladky before receiving an invitation to the workshop. I know a little about him now, but not a great deal. He never wrote a book. There is a three part audio on YouTube featuring him being interviewed by Alexander Lowen’s son, Frederic. I know he was a psychiatrist, that he believed strongly in aliveness, and that he practiced for a long time, including some early years in the military. He died in 2012. And he’s going to bring me to the concept of sanctuary, and this short video makes a nice bridge.
After the intensely emotional and shared energies of a group process, it isn’t always easy to locate a way into an aspect of the event that invites a more public discussion. Some of the experiences do not translate easily into words. Perhaps that explains the gap between finishing the program and starting this entry.
Diane Gobrogge, one of the trainers, had studied with Frank Hladky for many years. She shared some of his mannerisms, and gestures, and teachings. Her love for his teachings shone through her own teachings. She remarked on how Frank would often pat his patient on the back at the end of the session and say: You’ll be okay.
What struck me was her observation that colleagues were always welcome at Frank’s big house in Oklahoma. It was a place to go to connect with other bio-energetic practitioners, to relax, and renew and to connect with nature.
This led to me thinking how important this kind of sanctuary is in the life of a therapist. We need silence and distance, and we also need the company of others with similar sensibilities. We need a safe refuge where we can do work with colleagues whose skills we can respect and honour, whose abilities and intuition can support our emotions and our own ceaselessly unfolding and emergent process.I wasn’t going to include this short poem by Dorothy Parker, but then I saw a picture of her, seated between Faulkner and Fitzgerald, on a mural at the Starbucks in the Barnes & Noble bookstore in St. Augustine. She has her drink and they have theirs, but otherwise, there is no contact.
“My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.”I understand that Dorothy Parker suffered from depression. I like the image of smoke rising from burning bridges – already these burning bridges are shifting images. But her sanctuary feels to be a lonely one, estranged, the self-imposed and painful sanctuary occupied by so many sad souls.
I felt moved even more deeply by this longer poem, also named Sanctuary, by Jean Valentine:
"You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you
—What is it like for you there?
Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship—
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices—
What are you afraid of?
What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.
What happens when you die?
“... not scatter the voices,”
Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in
another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What
word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the
restlessness ... Repose. To run like water—
What is it like there, right now?
Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in
against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.
What do you dread?
What happens when you die?
What do you dread, in this room, now?
Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.
To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered life.
Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes."
In her memorial, Diane noted these qualities in Frank Hladky: As our Teacher he taught the importance of Contact, Trusting the Organism, Following the Impulse, Always looking for the Aliveness in the body and Finding One's True Nature.
She noted his love of D.H. Lawrence, and recalled Frank handing out this quote of his at a workshop:
"This is my creed: For man the vast marvel is to be alive. For man as for flower and beast and bird the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
The magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours alone, and ours only for a time.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos."
As I reflect on five days of deep interpersonal, loving connection and support, I find myself wishing that kind of sanctuary was always available to me, in the way Dr Hladky made possible. The work of psychotherapy is, like the work of a writer, ultimately lonely. We give, and our giving is done invisibly, save for our patients, who bring their pain and their hopes to us.
In my previous career, as a full-time emergency physician, the hospital was – in many ways – a sanctuary of sorts. We witnessed for one another, we went out together; we played baseball together. Psychotherapy is different. My most fluid and successful resuscitations in the ER were always seen. My most powerful psychotherapy sessions can only be described, after the fact, in a forum like this one, which can never capture the myriad of non-verbal contact and emotional nuances that pass fleetingly by in a moment of deep transformation.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been seeing so many butterflies this summer. There’s something about the brevity and beauty of their lives, that speaks to the work I am doing in my own life.
Sessions, workshops, healing moments – they are all brief, all pass by in the seeming blink of an eye. And yet, something lasting and profound is left behind and we carry it inside ourselves, ready to bestow it on others, on the hurt places inside ourselves. In workshops, there can be such a deep sense of travelling a path together, that cords are forged for life, tender tendrils of commonly experienced pain and love. At the end of my level 1 training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, one of my trainers, Celia Grand, said to us that the connections we made would remain alive in the universe for all our lives, even if some of us did not meet in person again.
Cada paso que diste fue un peso que yo tambien di said one Chilean participant in the closing circle. “Every step you took felt like a step I took.” She was speaking to all of us. We walked together. Each individual session felt like a group embrace.
Medicine, psychiatry ... these once proud disciplines now seem beleaguered and exhausted and frightened. Research shows that one of the only effective interventions for the onslaught of rampant burnout (approximately fifty per cent of physicians in Canada and the United States now show significant signs of burnout) is group sharing and group process.
The main intention of our teaching series is to create community and to foster a setting for sharing in dialogue and mutual support. We are only at the beginning of this quest. My vision is to see a time when we will all have places to go where we might renew and re-inspire without running away from our challenges, or without the need to turn our back on them.
Without sanctuary, life – even at the best of times – is difficult. What might sanctuary look like for you? How can you see joining with other physicians and physician psychotherapist or mental health care practitioner colleagues and working on your own health, healing and sense of connection?
Can you envision a sanctuary for yourself that would, first and foremost, support your aliveness and connection with your soul?
No comments:
Post a Comment