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Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress

As of immediately, I am moving my site to a WordPress template at a new location. If you are subscribed to this blogspot address through Bloglines, I've followed their directions for duplicate feeds so in theory you will automatically be moved in a week or so to the new address. Not to be untrusting, but...(you could go ahead and change the feed yourself).

I look forward to hearing from you at the new site!

Who Heals the Healer?

Hear Dan read this post.


Well, the obvious answer is we are all one another's healers. Through simple acts of appreciation, a willingness to listen, the offering of new perspectives and ideas, just a touch, perhaps -- all of which may trigger an inner connection or two, and a resolution to something that may have been bothering somebody a long time. A very effective leader I know told me one time her "secret" was this: "All you have to do is take care of people. They do the rest." And it strikes me this is another way to say the same thing, that in the sunlight of one another's care we are stronger, and because we are stronger, things can change. Things can get done. Oh, I know, it isn't so simple as all that. The leader I am thinking of is an incredibly good reader of others and their needs, and she's no pushover -- what she has is a gift.

And yet, who heals her? Who heals any of us when we are alone, whether it is at the top of the organization or at the edge of a community or even in its midst while attempting to create positive change? How does the one who brings care, the one who stands solid when others cannot, the one who gives, sustain herself or himself? The risk is what some colleagues used to refer to as "change agent flu," a disease caused by not seeing enough organizational or institutional change from one's hard work, the symptoms of which are such things as low self-esteem, persistent crankiness, pushing too hard at meetings, private panic attacks, recurring depressions, darkening cynicism, and finally withdrawal from the work that a person once loved the best.

And yes, support groups can help, and that's a variation of where we started, with the thought that we are all one another's healers.



There is another answer, tougher, that takes us to a deeper well, that causes reflection at a more primary and sometimes primitive level of ourselves, that has to do with why we do the work we do, why we lead, why we need to create change, and ultimately what we are trying to work out in ourselves through our own leadership. And so we are faced with our values, perhaps our sense of worthiness to the roles we have accepted, and to the processes of self-reliance and of our own healing, processes which are like roots slowly growing down and in, searching for nourishment within our personal, inner landscape.

I have found, like you, that sometimes that landscape is intact and sufficient, and sometimes it has been washed away -- by events, by dilemmas, by pure exhaustion. And when it is washed away and there is no one to talk to about it at the moment, then there has to be another place to go. A place of essence or peace that is given, not self-created. Precisely because personal landscapes are prone to get washed away from time to time. But to find that place can be difficult. It never seems to leave a forwarding address from the last time we were there. And so, in turn, the amazing process of waiting kicks in, sometimes for excruciatingly long periods, but never, it seems to me, forever.

A little context and disclosure. The last time I got washed away, it was the product of an awkward conversation with a friend (worse for me, in many ways, than a client), with the issue being exactly my role as a "healer" and the inexpressible aloneness I sometimes feel that comes with it. I was really suffering over this, busy linking stuff that went back to my family of origin, feeling alienated, and wanting something more than me relying on this role to keep the relationship in tact. I was facing where the role came from in the first place, how I'd used it to foster and maintain connections and what that was now delivering back to me in return, what baggage and insecurities I was still carrying that might prevent me from dropping it. So that's where the question came from. I was feeling like a burning bush that had burned itself right out.

Fortunately, the wait for me wasn't too long. The next day I happened to be sorting out some CD's and ran across the Charlotte Church song, "All Love Can Be." The song, with music by James Horner and lyrics by Will Jennings, can be found on the soundtrack CD for the film, "A Beautiful Mind." I dug up Jennings's lyrics, put the song on my player, and almost instantly felt something reach into me and go all the way down to the painful places I had been feeling most alone. Was finding that particular song that day synchronicity, just a meaningful coincidence? Well, perhaps, if you believe that synchronicity finds you.

Here are the words (there are several slight variations -- if these are not the official ones, please let me know). Here is the song.

I will watch you in the darkness
Show you love will see you through
When the bad dreams wake you crying
I'll show you all love can do
All love can do

I will watch by the night
Hold you in my arms
Give you dreams where no one will be
I will watch through the dark
Till the morning comes

For the lights will take you
Through the night to see
All love, showing us all love can be

I will guard you with my bright wings
Stay till your heart learns to see
All love can be

There is agency in this world, of course, and maybe as the song suggests, it comes from the heart of an angel. I am sure you have your own interpretations of this force; for me angels are but one elegant archetype. But whatever it is, it finds us, if we let it. And that did answer my question -- at least on that day.

Technorati tag: Healing

Points of Healing

Hear Dan read this post.


The important thing to know is what is healing. There is a place in all of us -- a difficult spot -- where something is felt that is literally unbearable. It is too simple to say what we feel is pain. It is a kind of pain: anger, embarrassment, despair, humiliation, fear, hurt, or a complex arrangement of these emotions, a dark bouquet. And more to the point, this is a place inside ourselves we have learned to bypass quickly, an image in a movie put on fast forward the moment the pain begins; fast, fast forward, until the effect is only momentary discomfort, obliquely conscious, or numbed out completely. This is the door to the wound. And the wound will have its way, like a broken piece of glass or a metal blade swallowed at an early age.



We avoid constantly the point of that blade. Others cannot see what it means to us. I may show you only a facade of arrogance or some selfish, superficial part of me when internally at the moment I switch to fast-forward what I actually experience is humiliation, or the all-consuming fear of it. I develop a reputation for arrogance or shallowness, but what I cannot see or feel is how I got to be this way. Switching into fast-forward has become automatic, so that I no longer feel the frames of the movie that I might see if I slowed down. And I have my explanations for all of this. "It was the way I was raised. My parents did this to me. I've always been this way. It's just the way I am." I hardly notice my deflections and dismissals of the deep parts of me where unsettledness and maybe chaos still reign. In the end I give this place a voice, begrudgingly. This is the voice of my low self-esteem, my dark side, my insensitivity. If I am clever, I go farther: this is my lack of meaning, my search for Vocation, my bitter complaint with the world.

Healing comes when I resist the fast-forward button and I let the movie play; when I attend to my experience, when I name the thing I'm actually feeling, when I notice the specific discrepancy between my emotions inside and the way I am projecting myself to others.

When I see my masks. I can begin to remember my life and start to re-locate joy. It is someplace. But first I have to find the folder I put it in. I've forgotten the password to open it. (Here's a clue: it's listed under your mother's maiden name.)

Technorati tags: Wound, Joy

World on Fire

[I am reposting this from Daniel O'Connor's great blog, Catallaxis. Daniel's site offers a sophistocated discusson of enlightened economic models. And it is clear where his heart is. Thank you, Daniel.]

"This latest video from Sarah McLachlan is a powerful way to think about issues of price and value... specifically, the very different subjective valuations that can be associated with the very same objective price."

"Sarah chose to spend nearly all the money she would have used for a professional music video on a whole portfolio of life-changing goods for people in need of the fundamentals of a decent life."

"Thanks to uber-blogger ~C4Chaos for this video."

The Long Road

Hear Dan read this post.

Someone I knew ran off this road returning home late one night. He had been drinking and died in the accident that everyone knew wasn't one. I heard about this a couple months ago just after it happened. I didn't know him that well, but well enough to be really sorry. Those who knew him wondered if maybe they had been responsible. Anyone could have said more to him, asked better questions and listened. And the truth may be that if he knew he was going to die that night, he might have even fantasized about the regrets his death would cause others. A pattern with suicidal people is to imagine how others will feel after they are dead. It is a common way for disguised anger and self-pity to show themselves.



As a young man in training in my profession, I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, answering phones in the middle of the night. I still remember the two most important things I was taught to give the people who called: limits and support. Limits on doing harm: "Put the pills away. Think about how this will affect your kids for the rest of their lives." Support for the person: "You are good and deserve to live and have a good life." It was all about boundaries and care.

If the "someone I knew" had called me on his drive home across the desert, I would have said, "Get off the highway as soon as you can. Don't let the long road get to you. You've done fine things in your life and have more to do. Other people care for you. Lean on them a little. You are trying to handle the despair in your life all alone. I'll keep talking until you get to a motel." It's what survivors do: imagine what they could have said or could have said differently after the person is gone.

There was one other lesson I remember from suicide prevention training. You can't feel guilty. If a person really wants to take their own life, they'll find a way. You can't stop them, no matter how good you are at connecting. This is what it means when a person has been wholly swallowed up by their own internal wounds and has lost contact with any guardian angels, inner or outer.

We have a responsibility to help each other not let it get so bad. Human love may not hold the perfection of what is divine within, but sometimes it's still enough to help what is best in us remember itself and survive.

Technorati tags: suicide, choices, guardianangels

The Dance of Light and Dark

Hear Dan read this post.

A person's life is a dance. A flowing movement, a pattern and a breaking pattern, a turn and a reverse. And, yes, also more than a single misstep. There is no one right way to do it and so you practice alignment with your image of what the dance is supposed to be -- at least to you. And the greater part of the mystery is that you dance with a hidden, inner partner representing all those aspects of yourself that are yet unknown to you.



The beauty of dance, like all arts, is not in the pure performance, not in how flawless or technically brilliant the dance becomes, but what comes through in the human performance. The dance is always more than what we see: what has been choreographed and rehearsed. The dance also reveals the dancer's private human story and individuality, her deeper range of impulses, thoughts, images, intuitions and feelings. They flicker across her face and give their life to the sway of her body. The dance is about her as uniquely someone. These aspects come forward bidden by the music in the moment, and often only slightly channelled by the illusions and rhythms of art. Her good and her bad are in the ritual dance, her skilled and unskilled selves, the controlled and more flagrant parts of her being, her illumined and shadowed features -- all sliding one into the other like waves in a slant of sun. An awkward dancer who is true to herself may be the better one after all, in her ability to be her whole, vulnerable self; in her inability to be false. The best, most masterful dancers, the memorable ones, never lose this quality of vulnerable individuality. No matter how good, their souls are never submerged by perfection.

The secret is this: in the dance of our inner light and dark we all become part of an outer light and and outer darkness; sun and moon, midnight and dawn. This connection makes the dance a cosmic and spiritual thing which cannot be contained. Beyond time and space, the dance is a part of our nature and a part of Nature itself, and in that is enormous power and magic and exquisite grace.