More Deeply Real

To encourage, enliven, and inspire 
your journey as seeker, 
I am now offering  
a "Poem of the Week", 
sharing one of my own poems.
Here is the first offering.

Prayer for Choosing to Soften
 
At best, we will need therapy 
and meditation practice
for the rest of our lives,
and some of us will soften 
and begin to heal,
and some of us will keep resisting,
afraid to be other than
alone behind walls.
 
And the world goes on
as it always has 
and always will,
warring more
wherever we resist,
and warring less
wherever we soften.
 
Sometimes we feel like fools.
We could be getting drunk
and screwing around
in opulent, burning fortresses,
instead of humbly sitting here,
becoming naked.
 
But the love we seek
needs us to live in the wound
like maggots cleansing 
an open sore of infection,
like bees finding pollen 
to make honey,
like mystics waking in the heart 
of the cosmic rose,
realizing what we called self
was a simple portal,
a crudely carpentered door,
we are quietly passing through,
beyond which
compassion is
forever opening.
 
 
 
 

Kneeling

Here’s a link to a blogpost I contributed to the Natural Dreamwork blog. You can learn about Natural Dreamwork and access other posts from the team of Natural Dreamwork practitioners at http://www.thenaturaldream.com.

Natural Dreamwork During COVID-19 and Global Liminality

sacred words

From time to time I’ve contemplated what words are most essential to me. My list has grown slowly over time, through lived experience. The first word to become sacred to me was the word “we.” Culturally, we livin in a me-against-you time, and so the healing essence of the word we is even more needed. This year, the word “vessel” became part of my list, as the best word for the deep inner space where soul-life cooks. Here is a list of some of the words that capture the heart of living, forming connection, entering relationship with each other:

we

us

home

empathy

belonging

earth (earth)

poem

tree

roots

breath

ground

weaving

dancing

singing

attached

open

now

cosmos

peace

dream

wonder

wander

feel

vessel

yes

It’s been a wonderful year long journey!  I went to Costa Rica in March 2018 and completed training as a Let Your Yoga Dance Teacher.  In September, 2018 I began a 200 hour yoga teacher training program at my local yoga studio, Flourish Yoga + Wellbeing, in Fishers, Indiana.  On March 3, I graduated!!!!

I am already including yoga in my body movement group for eating disorder patients at Charis Center for Eating disorders.  And I am looking forward to starting to teach Let Your Yoga Dance at Flourish and to helping with their yoga nidra offerings.  My long term goals are to incorporate yoga and expressive art therapy into workshops and retreats.

While doing this yoga training, I have also been working with my dreams, with the help of a Natural Dreamwork practitioner. (www.thenaturaldream.com) The combo of dreamwork and yoga is incredibly healing and transformative for me. As yoga helps me unravel and release old conditioned reactivity and blockage within my body, the dreams are helping me untangle the emotional and spiritual wounds within my soul.  I am now a practitioner in training in the Natural Dreamwork tradition. And so, though I graduated from the yoga teacher training, my spiritual learning journey is far from ending.

Before teaching my first yoga class, I dreamed that a group of humpback whales were arriving at the yoga studio and would fill the whole space.  At first I reacted – there will be no space for me!  Where will I teach yoga?!  Then I realized the whales are arriving for my yoga class!  So much living, ancient embodied energy, showing up in to be with me, to celebrate this journey and the new growth and vitality it is bringing me.

I look forward to many more postings here about my new yoga and dreamwork path and how they deepen and expand upon creative healing work with others.

I belong myself to that which I love. (Toko-Pa Turner)

In the past few years, my capacity to belong to self and World has been healing in ever-widening and deepening ways. I have been discovering how to “belong myself to life” as author Toko-Pa Turner writes. But more is happening than my own practicing of belonging. As I belong myself to life, world and Self are also belonging me to them.

The imagination that lives in the body and expresses itself through dreams and art-making is at the heart of this belonging, and is absolutely essential to soul-life. Much happened in my life to sever my connection from soul.  For most of us, the severing begins by just being born in this age of empty materialism and environmental destruction.  We are all wounded by this soul-deadening, imagination-impaired age.

I have been lucky and blessed to have found my vocation as art therapist at the beginning of my adult life and to have followed it for 30 years, through early novitiate stages, through challenging times of doubt, exhaustion, and disillusionment, and into years of deepened learning, increased mastery, and improved self-care. I have been rediscovering belonging every step of the way of those 30 years. And now, as I stand on the foundation of the mastery that I have painstakingly established, I am finding my capacity to belong is ripening, as is my courage to welcome and accept soul’s invitations for ever-evolving belong that arrive in dreams, sacred encounters, wild moments.

The threads of belonging radiate out from within the electric warmth of the body. The threads of belonging radiate out from the heart, from the flesh. They radiate out from every living presence in the natural world, the dream world, the universe.  I have lived too often feeling I am alone, all my threads of connectivity tamped down by hurt, pulled in by fear of further hurt.  In the past couple years, through an intensified engagement in art-based self-reflection and contemplation, I have seen the extreme severing of my connective threads. I have begun to unfurl them again.I have found the eternal vitality in these soul fibers. I have felt myself re-attaching to life, and life re-attaching with loving welcome to me.

The photo above is an overhead view of Vitality Vessel, a 24-inch tall vessel I created using torn, painted paper and torn strips of my unpublished memoir. The entire outside and inside of the vessel is lined with these strips. This vessel is the culminating art piece made during an 18-month period of self-reflection and inquiry into the roots and growth within personal compassion fatigue experiences. During this expressive artist pilgrimage, I wrote both a memoir and a weekly image journal, in which I logged reflections on my own art processes (visual art, poetry, dance, music) and also reflected on how I had been impacted by the week’s complex therapeutic interactions in the expressive art therapy groups/sessions I led. (I took a break from this blog during this time of contemplation, feeling that my pilgrimage needed to be personal and private in order to deeply ripen before I began sharing publicly about what it taught me.)

During this pilgrimage,  I also took retreats to natural settings, where I made art and hiked in the mountains of Massachusetts, New Mexico and Washington and danced and did yoga in Costa Rica. I also interviewed other art therapists about their experiences of compassion, fatigue and vitality. Many of those I interviewed were fellow faculty at St. Mary of the Woods College in Indiana.  We created art about our compassion fatigue/vitality experiences and displayed these works in the first faculty show of the Woods’ Art Therapy MA program.  Vitality Vessel is one of the pieces I contributed to this show.

During my expressive arts pilgrimage, I also looked for and found mentors and guides who could help me deepen into and find the soul-gifts within the journey. Most helpful to me were: depth psychologist Francis Weller, with whom I had monthly mentoring Skype session; art therapist wise elder Maxine Junge, with whom I also had monthly Skype mentoring sessions and who I visited at her home on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound; and Mary Jo Heyen, Natural Dreamwork practitioner with whom I consulted bi-weekly to tend dreams that came (and still come) nightly in abundance, offering healing encounters over and over again.

In the above image of the vessel, you are given a glimpse of the depths within which I searched as I wrote, painted, scribbled, danced, dreamed and journeyed through the profound soul-work passage that this expressive arts pilgrimage became for me.

I was gifted with generous funding for this pilgrimage by applying for and receiving the Creative Renewal Fellowship given to me and 29 other artists and art administrators in Central Indiana. I was the first art therapist to receive this fellowship, which was first offered in 1999. I was a fellow during the program’s 10th round from July 2017 – December 2018.  It took me many years, and many failed applications, to finally receive this generous award. Each application involved learning to validate myself as art therapist and artist, and though each failed application was incredibly painful, the learning and struggle involved to finally receive and embark on the fellowship was essential. I can now say I received the fellowship at just the right period of my life and that all the other attempts were part of what made me so ready, so prepared, to engage fully in the fellowship pilgrimage. In fact, I could say that the pilgrimage included all the years of those initial attempts.

What I experienced and all that unfolded during the fellowship is too complex to describe with any clarity in one blog post.  More posts will follow throughout the coming year going into each of the richly rewarding components of my journey.  Here I want to share that the essential healing theme woven through all aspects of my pilgrimage, which was that of returning home, of re-belonging to self and world. This belonging is experienced as threads of living energy, waking, unfurling, rejoining the vibrant web of life.  Vitality Vessel depicts those out-reaching, in-reaching pulsing fibers of connection. It is a self-portrait of my own healing. It is a portrait of what I call “godding” – another verb that speaks of belonging, as divine energy expressed in living, flowing, all-embracing longing, the soul’s eternal homing.

(Opening quote from: Toko-Pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home,  Her Own Room Press: Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, 2017)