Therapy/therapeutic. From Greek: healing, curing. The introduction of these words to English was part of the New Latin revived in Renaissance times as a language of description and categorization for the discipline of Science. They have further definitions in Greek: ministering, to cure or treat; related to attendant. The latter is significant to me because the other word that I am exploring today is attend.

My American Heritage dictionary gives the first definition of attend as “to be present.” This is a rather vague definition that can be shaped to fit many uses, and indeed attend is used in many ways. The etymology of the word, according to Barnhart Concise Etymology, is originally from Latin: “pay attention to, listen to; literally, stretch to.” I am interested most in the use of attend as in the phrase,”attend to grief.” To me, a definition of listening or even “stretching to” is implied in that phrase. Being present, listening, paying attention. Attend might seem to require an event – what would you attend, if not a house show, a pep rally, Thanksgiving dinner? In the context of therapy, however, attend and attendant take on other meanings, related more to expression and visceral or cellular experiences.

Therapy has been a sticky word for me. In all of its uses – physical therapy, massage therapy, hydrotherapy, psychotherapy – the practitioner is introduced to a system of analysis and particular type of knowledge, the application of which are presumed to bring about healing or curing. Despite the fact that often such healing is almost impossible to document objectively, as the scientific medical community requires in order to approve the medical efficacy of a modality, who is to say that one particular system of knowledge and analysis is more effective for an individual than any other. This may sound unnecessarily relativistic, but there is more to it than that. The process of healing, no matter how much it is broken down and studied by scientists, still contains a huge element of mystery. Why does one person die in four months while another, similarly diagnosed, lives for many years? Timing, community support, individual constitution, expertise of the healing team, health resources available, financial status, etc etc, undoubtedly all play a role. I believe that underlying all of that is something that cannot be measured, or possibly described. The mysterious movement of life. All of this is not to say that I think that analysis and systems and knowledge are irrelevant to healing, for certainly those are valuable aspects of therapy.

The relationship between healing and attending in the Greek language illuminates for me a piece of the healing process that I am trying to grasp. It is ignored by much of Western medicine and yet is incredibly valuable. That is, an attending to or attention to, the mystery. However mystery may manifest – whether it is in the magic of the relationship of healer and patient, the location on earth and in community, breath/movement underlying everything, the “Why” of life, love… What if the most significant, essential, transformative healing results not from analysis and applied solutions, but from attention to mystery. To numinous. To story. To story as a communicator of the mysterious.

Story may feel like a random insertion here. The original intention of this blog was to explore myth and story, and I am realizing that stories – personal stories, land stories, cultural stories, whether mythological or factual – are, when attended, listened to, and told with care and emotion, a fundamental way in which humans access divine mystery. One of several ways, including movement, meditation, ritual, but still a very fundamental piece of our spirituality. What’s more, stories are a way to express and share mystery, or the numinous, or the sacred. Stories help to create a sense of connection through and between and around our personal divine. Story can be told by the body, too, without words, and I think that the most gifted and wise healers attend to the story of word language, of body language, and of visceral or inner language. They listen, be present – and, maybe they do some medical interventions – but the most meaningful impact comes from their attention.

As an aside here, at the end, I want to add that bringing the sense of attend into therapy, changes in a curious fashion the way that it sits with its partner words in the earlier phrases. Massage – from Arabic massa, to touch or feel – therapy becomes a practice of presence with the tissues and the emotional stories held therein. Attending to the stories by touching them, both physically and spiritually. Psychotherapy here means attending to the soul. Listening to the stories of the soul, however they may present themselves, drawing them out to be witnessed by both the teller and the hearer. A profound experience for both.

We need to preserve and embrace the priceless resource of [our] individual wildness in order to become fully human. And as a species, we need the wildness of the land, air, and waters in order that we might remain fully human.

Bill Plotkin, from Nature and the Human Soul

Individual Wildness. Yes. That is what I have inside of me that carries me through my days – sometimes it is curled in a tiny, furry, almost-prickly ball and hidden in the darkest corner of my heart. Sometimes it is bigger than my evening shadow and I must pant with the effort of containing it. And sometimes, it fits right inside my skin, moving in concert with all of the parts of me, bringing magic and delight to my day and those I greet.

Yes, Wildness. That is the part of me that recognizes the person-hood of other beings, who are not human, not commonly recognized as part of the community by a majority of humans in our society. That is the part of me that feels fierce joy in the dance of the waterfall sister, the part that grieves unabashedly in the embrace of cedar and douglas fir.

It is also the part of me that rejects the demands of human society, beyond the basic economy of gift and barter that reins only in private households, if even there. The part of me that rails against my phone, keys, wallet. The vultures inside, in my soul, watching the encultured(entrapped) me running at the beck and call of the credit/id/phone/car. The wildness inside, watching for the death of my dissociative engagement with the artifacts of my culture. Alas, I do not think I will ever fully die to our culture until I leave this body. But I can cultivate my wildness – if that is even possible – or at least let it grow, mindfully and joyfully.

In the same section of Nature and the Human Soul (p. 88) where the prior quote lies, Bill suggests that Freud’s name for our inner, individual wildness is “id,” and that his agenda was to suppress the id by building up the ego. Throughout the book, Bill emphasizes that an egocentric society, being what we have now, is totally destructive to humanity and to our environment/home/ecosystem/community. The same egocentrism encouraged by dear old Freud. I haven’t studied Freud since high school, so I am not capable of a knowledgeable critique of his theories or Bill’s response; however, I do live here, in this society, and feel the destruction internally and externally, the consequence and anguish of consumption, willful ignorance, and lack of accountability. If anything, Freud is a product of his human society, one which encouraged conformity and industry both individually and culturally.

From what I have read of Bill Plotkin’s writings, his agenda is generally to encourage people to become mature adults who can hold both the needs of the human community and those of the other-than-human community, hold them in mind and heart and body, and balance them so that neither outweighs the other. Or maybe his agenda is to stimulate internal wildness and thus a greater connection to self and place and community. In any case, these align with what I have read of Malidoma Some’s teachings about indigenous worldview/lifestyle/way of being. A strong contrast to the repression and egotism of modernity. A relief, in fact, to be able to relate to the self and others on such a deep, whole, and compassionate level.

Wildness. I love words, and that word calls me to return to it. What does it mean, individual wildness? Is it something that is best experienced rather than spoken of? What experiences bring it out? Play, dance, loving touch, creation, relationships with land and other beings, adventures outside of human community, meditation… and more. What else? If experiencing our wildness is something that brings us into greater connection with our deep self, soul, divine nature, then the more we pursue wildness, the more we encourage and develop it internally and relate to it externally, the closer we get to our core – what a friend of mine once described as a core of light (I imagined a long light bulb, or a spine that is a light bulb) that has been covered with loads of muck. That was when we were 19, but I still think of that image, only now it has been infused with mischief and joy, and tempered with grief. The muck is really just grief and my resistance to feeling grief that I must travel through sometimes to reach the spine-light-bulb. Oh, but wildness. Finding that, being in it, makes it easier to feel the grief. I do think so. The grief is part of all of it, losing weight as I learn to accept it. And as I lose the heaviness of griefmuck, I feel the strength of my core, joy and grief together becoming who I am.

I am almost positive that this man represents my animus. Or in any case, he being part of me, is my inner masculine unconscious. Or, perhaps, a masculine expression of my soul. He was laying on my right side, the masculine side. He was so soft though, not masculine in expression much. In body, yes, but in manner effeminate. Clinging to me, almost, almost desperately, but more indignantly. Telling me that I have hurt him, that I have been thoughtless, that I know better. In a soft and loving way, he tells me this. Which felt good – it felt good to be loved by him, even though I was disappointing him. I am loved. But the reproach, the indignance, the disappointment.

I do feel that for myself right now. I do, it’s true. All three of those are strong in me. For myself. A reinforcement of those feelings, I guess. That I am not treating myself well, that I have mildly abandoned the very significant things I learned about myself on my vision quest in order to survive financially; I know that what I am doing doesn’t work. And yet, I don’t know how to get out of it right now. I need money, I need to pay bills and get my massage license – a potential way out of the trap. I need to work to get those things, even though it hurts me. Even though it’s so far from who I am, where I am going, that I dream warnings. He told me what I already know, and what he didn’t offer is what I need: options. Viable options.

I listened to an episode of Radiolab today, about lies. It was extremely fascinating. At the end, they had a bit about self-deception, and how, according to some studies, people who lie to themselves a little bit – for example, telling themselves that they are “the best” at what they are doing, in competitive sports at least, actually are more likely to win the race. Additionally, those people tend to be happier, while depressed people tend to be more realistic. The conclusion was that a little lie might actually help your mood and your achievements.

I don’t quite know where this fits into the whole situation, in terms of my dream. Definitely I need to start telling myself different things, starting with that the job I have now is actually NOT ok. It does NOT work for me. But there IS a better job out there for me, both immediately and in a long-term career situation. It is time to find it. I have many skills, I am good at many things, and it’s time to stop doubting – or being too realistic – and use confidence and belief in myself to create a life that I want to live.

I would like to stress at this point that where mentors and elders are lacking, and where initiation in one form or another is not recognized, there can be no support system capable of curbing the intense sense of aloneness that haunts the psyche of the modern person. Only being part of a community will address the loneliness of modern people.

But I have learned that there is in many Western people a strong resistance to joining community because of all the flaws apparent in the intentional communities they have seen. Part of this resistance stems perhaps from a disappointed idealism, a demand that a community be perfect. But in fact an intentional community in the West is a place where people agree to work at becoming better connected to one another. …

People’s resistance to community in the West may also come from an undeveloped sense of personhood. Someone who believes that community exists in order to provide for his or her needs without having to give anything in response will probably never find the right community. In this case resistance arises because of old, unmet psychological needs. Since giving is the modus operandi of community, proper spiritual and emotional clarity within are necessary for establishing a sense of belonging. Otherwise, people will tend to look for Spirit using the same compulsive methods they use to search for material goods.

- Malidoma Some’, The Healing Wisdom of Africa

Malidoma hits the nail on the head in these paragraphs about community and the western relationship to it. There is a strong tension between desire for community and the “spirit of independence” that America is based on. I especially see this in my generation, among people similar to me, unsatisfied with what the general culture and society offer, searching for a cultural/societal model that is both radically opposed to the mainstream, and that fulfills underlying desires for connection and purpose. Many of us don’t really know how to live in a connected and interdependent community, not having been raised in one.

The other point he makes is that the connections, both difficult and joyous, of community, are the main balm that will soothe the alienation and isolation of the post-modern American. Specifically what is needed are elders and mentors to witness the growth of the individual within the community, and rituals to mark significant phases of life, both in individuals and in the community. He believes, and I agree with him, that these aspects of life are what is missing in modern American society, and that absence, I believe, is the source of a whole host of ills, from physical ailments to depression to schizophrenia to the destruction of other-than-human lifeforms. Turning away from the human community has meant also turning away from the earthly organism community, and has lead to illness with the earth itself.

The question, of course, is how to form community, whether within the city or outside of it, and how to weather the crises and transformations larger than each individual. How to remain committed when so many options are available, and leaving is supremely easy. How to communicate, how to give and how to receive, how to address those “old, unmet psychological needs” that prevent us from forming healthy, supportive connections and allowing love – both soft and hard – to guide our actions. And of course, how to survive as a community in a society that encourages us to prioritize the individual, and to leave when we are dissatisfied, rather than stay and work it out.

I am thinking, these days, that the answers to these questions are: try, and learn from mistakes, and keep trying. Just step in to what I want, step into community, shared space, healing space, communication, and learn. Don’t let mistakes, and consequences, and fear, impede or block or freeze movement. And have a ton of forgiveness, for myself, and for others. Learn, learn, learn, humbly and with gratitude.

“Working together to produce or create something.”

Collaboration can be challenging for US citizens of my generation, and younger. Brought up in competitive and gradually more isolating social situations, marked by the use of increasingly sophisticated interactive technology, such as blogs…, we learn more about how to work alone in our rooms than anything else. At least I have.

But seriously, collaboration is awesome. From the perspective of health and massage therapy, healing and wellness doesn’t happen without collaboration. The depth of change and effect of therapeutic touch is as much determined by the intention and state of being of the client as by the effort and presence of the practitioner. Often there is an unconscious alignment between the two parties.

When a client dislikes a massage, the cause can include techniques that are uncomfortable, personality disharmony between client and practitioner, a disconnect in the practitioner between body and mind or otherwise not being present and attentive to the client, and, just as likely, a disconnect for the client in which what they think they want or need, in their mind, is different from how they present themselves physically or energetically, or even emotionally. A massage practitioner, or anyone else dealing with client primarily on a physical/energetic level, without extensive discussion, will often pursue what they feel, potentially leaving the mind of the client feeling dissatisfied, if there is such a disconnect.

Which leads to another level of collaboration, that of explicit verbal collaboration. While quiet, soothing relaxation massage has its place, in order to really affect change and growth, there must be discussion, verbal connection and affirmation of the physical and energetic realm. That is when massage is most powerful and transformative, when physical, verbal, and energetic communication combine in one event so as to clarify and support each mode of communication, thus providing a more complete picture in service to the overall goal of health and wellness.

I believe this is also true about anything in which two or more people are involved together. Seriously. In some ways, it is a new way of thinking about creation for me. I have often been a solo creator, and while that has been worthwhile and useful for me in my life, I feel that now in order to continue to grow, I must ask for, pursue, and encourage collaboration. My massage practice is demanding collaboration of me, for that is who I am, who I want to work with in massage: Collaborators. I feel this impulse and demand moving throughout the other parts of my life, the creative aspects of artist, and dancer, homemaker, listener, lover. I want to learn things, take them into myself and transform the skills and knowledge into my own expressions and wisdom, and then bring them back out to interact with the people around me, to create more beauty than I ever could alone, and to learn even more. To collaborate, explicitly, verbally, physically, energetically, in creation of performance, ritual, love, spontaneous expression, joy, darkness.

If you want to collaborate with me, yeah! Let’s do it! I’m really excited about dance and massage right now…

It was challenging, especially the contact part for me at that time, but also incredibly fun and delicious to feel free to move my body however I chose, and to have a heightened sense of proprioception due to the Feldenkrais work. Being surrounded by a group of dancers totally new to me yet with whom I felt comfortable and familiar and capable of expressing the depths and elegance of movement inside myself – something I often suppress out of fear of appearing pretentious – was incredible; it was like coming home.

Something that was essential to my experience, that became very clear when I went to work almost immediately after the workshop, was that everyone there interacted with each other with respect, care, attention, and sharing of authority. Jayne, and other movers with years of performing, were excited to share what they know and do, but did not hold themselves over the participants. Even had there been participants not so experienced in dance/movement, I think the same feeling would have reigned. I felt confident, free to move in a way that felt best to me, using all of my capacity to do so. I spoke to the sharing circle at the end from a place of internal authority, and I felt strong in my expression, capable of using my body and words in a fine and deliberate way. At first I did feel some insecurity and compared myself to other movers, but I was slowly able to sink into my own strength, knowledge, and wisdom. There was little or no sense of hierarchy or structure in terms of movement of proper style. The workshop freed me to be in my own authority, and to be witnessed in my own authority while witnessing others.

Going to work afterward, where I have little to no authority, being new and “lowest” in the strict hierarchy of power, was a shock. All of my coworkers, managers, etc, are friendly enough within the hierarchy, but there is no doubt that it exists. In some ways it is nice to not have responsibility, and I definitely don’t want to be responsible for the finances of the pastry department, which is the next step in the hierarchy above my current position, where I am responsible mostly for my own performance as an employee of “The Friendliest Store in Town.”

I don’t like that kind of pigeonhole responsibility, however, nor that the owners and upper management are so far from me. I am invisible to them, except as a number (literally, I have an employee number). I like to work within a team for sure, but I do best as part of a group of individuals with equal or similar responsibility coming together for a common purpose. The corporate model does not work for me; I feel the weight of the hierarchy too heavily. It does offer financial security, protection, and benefits, but the distancing of personal and individual relationships, from bosses to the line of customers, is a high cost to pay. Especially in comparison with the relationships I had last year as a member of a massage therapy collective.

Expression of my internal authority, and witnessing of that expression, is clearly a significant theme for me, through words and body language movement. I look forward to seeing where it will bring me. I hope, among other places, it will bring me to another encounter with the remarkable and inspiring Jayne Lee.

Two weeks later I have remembered that on the first morning of the Vision Quest I participated in this September, 6 weeks ago, I dreamed that I was walking past cars parked on the street on which were perched vultures who watched me very closely. I realized after passing them that I had dropped my wallet, car keys, and cellphone that were in my hands, and I had to run back underneath the piercing, menacing gaze of the vultures to pick them up again.

And here, it happened. IT HAPPENED. Is it a simple predictor dream? I have had those before. I think not.

Vultures. Vultures eat dead flesh, they scavenge. These vultures, are they waiting for part of me to die, so that they can eat the dead flesh, consume it and return it to the cycle of death and life? And the part they are waiting for…

Wallet, cell phone, keys. To me, they are burdens of living in society that I must bear. They chain me to the expectations and commandments of the middle, the financial world. Throughout my life I have rejected or avoided or simply tried hard to ignore those expectations. Living in the middle world has always been very difficult for me, as I have preferred to reside almost anywhere else. Especially the middle world as structured in this time.

Wallet and keys, and later cellphone, did symbolize an exciting passage into adult responsibility when I was growing up. A taking on of the world at large. A certain air of independence.

Independence from the family, maybe, but not from anything else. No, not independence. It is almost impossible to navigate the middle world of our times without a wallet, cell phone, or keys. Not for very long anyway. The abundant fruits of my labor are kept in an institution, physically and emotionally separate from me, accessible – made physical – primarily through card access to digital networks. My identity, similarly, is proven through a card which allows me to access and move through the world more freely. Communication – again, access – with my family and community primarily takes place with the facilitation of a digital cell phone device and network, from point to disembodied point.

Cellphone, wallet, keys represent the increasing disembodiment and dissociation in my society. They are thus a locus for my resentment, frustration, and sorrow at the state of society that demands disembodiment from and rejection of the physical earth and the other species living on it, in favor of virtual realities, whether financial or digital or linguistic, created by humans.

Maybe, this is what I see after writing this out, maybe the vultures are inside of me, the parts of me that are waiting for the near death of the conceits of our society, willfully ignorant of other species, dallying dangerously in fantasies of complete immunity and exemption from the laws of earthly interdependence. Maybe the vultures are waiting for me to give up my keys to this sick society, so that they can eat what is rightfully dead and return the energy and matter to the cycle of death and rebirth and nourishment.

This is a quote from Gayle on this thread: http://shamanism.tribe.net/thread/8017710a-3194-46c8-a356-eb17a759eb08.

The first part of this sentence (a shaman is able to perceive perturbations in community energy) was happening to me in very specific ways in my early 20′s and freaked me out beyond words. I had to hide it somehow. I couldn’t deal with the information – I didn’t know what to do with it, I didn’t know how to talk about it, much less who would be safe to talk to about it. But I made so much art at that time of my life, and went so far into weird places, without using any drugs. Eventually I channeled that into dj’ing, dance parties, and relationships. I mean, not just sexual relationships, but basically using social obligation as a way to hide from the messages I was often getting about the power and spirit around me. Some people overwork themselves, some self-medicate with alcohol or other drugs, some go to a doctor to ask them for meds to shut the door. I over-socialised. Hah, so ironic. It makes sense, though, being fundamentally an introvert, that over-socializing would deaden me. I also have throughout all of my life been extremely sexual, and by my early 20′s had a well-established pattern of using my sexual power to hide from myself and others and to reinforce my self-hatred.

So here I am now, unburying some parts of me that have been hiding for ten years. I moved away from Oregon, to Washington, and my work and magic hid while my intellect and political consciousness bloomed, and I learned tools to control the movement of information so that it was less overwhelming. Now I am back in Oregon, which is my magic landscape, my home place, and I feel everything ramping up higher and faster, my magic, my direct experience and conscious interaction with spirit, my work in the material realm, my art, my desire. I have returned home to my land and I am returning home to my body and soul and spirit.

What a profound and incredible experience this has been. I find myself working hard now to unbury the attention and sensitivity that was so painful at 20. But I don’t need to work so hard, I think, it is still here. It is me. At 30, it is less painful, I can move out of the vulnerable space more easily, and I have more ideas of how to use the knowledge, though it still overwhelms me. I am ready to learn more tools, to use this sensitivity to attend to the ills of the community. Either through individual humans, many humans, or all peoples. I am ready to walk in grief with those who need to grieve. I am ready to attend to all. Whatever that may mean, whatever it could be.

I suppose that some people who know me might say that I already do that. I don’t know, all I know is that I am surrendering to the darkness and opening to the light and I will witness the little deaths and the big deaths. And dance the joy of the heart.

I petition to humbly let my light shine.

Well, I guess that’s just how it is going to be.

I heard a program on KXOT recently, KUOW’s alternate station where they play alot of CBC and BBC programming, called Speaking of Faith. The host was interviewing Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, a Haitian who has lived in the US for many years and is a scholar of Africology as well as a Vodou priest. At the same time, I have begun to read Malidoma Somé’s autobiography, describing his childhood and initiation in the Dagara society of West Africa. Both of these intelligent and wise men say things that are so remarkable because they dare to speak and fully believe what some might call utter nonsense, yet it is exactly what I want to hear, what I believe inside of myself and fear to speak.

Things that I can’t repeat in a sensical way here in the blog, but that are generally about how the spirit world operates and how it interacts with the physical world. Things that go totally against the grain of my scientist upbringing but that make complete sense to me, and have always made sense to me – I think that is why I read so many fantasy novels while growing up. I have yet to read anything about Haitian vodou, but it attracts me mightily as a result of this program. One thing that I want to know more about that Patrick talked about briefly is that some priests and others can read people almost immediately, what is going on with them, what their pain is and their joys. He said this is not a special, magical power necessarily – a child will often know whether an adult likes children or not without the adult saying anything. It is something that I feel capable of at times, sometimes more and sometimes less, but it is always hard for me to believe that what I intuit is true.

I do believe that such knowledge can be cultivated by anyone willing to spend time to become closer to the divine, and that the ultimate source of intuition and inner sense is the divine. Maybe this is part of my motivation for pursuing such a path. Or maybe it’s that I am already on the path, and what I am doing now is just following where it leads.

I feel so many thoughts, ideas, desires welling within me, but so few words to shape them into something that others might understand, but that is what I most want to do with them. And I want to hear and read and see other stories, of lives and of thoughts and of moments. Stories are everywhere, I just don’t always pay attention.