Deep Acceptance.

She says:  I have reached a place of deep acceptance.

I listen.

She says:  I have been here before, but never stayed.  This time I arrived with a plunk and have not left.

I listen.

I say: I think I know that place of deep acceptance.

She says: I think you do too.

I say: I think we have been there, together,  here in this room.

She says: I think we have too.

We sit in quiet silence in the late afternoon light.

I say:  I hope this is not an inappropriate comment, but I am happy for you.

She sits back more deeply into her chair and smiles.

She says:  Ah!  You get it!!

Six Months of Tears.

One of my classmates happened to be in Khatmandou when Connie passed. She offered two Khata’s at a Buddhist temple for Connie’s journey. They are pictured here. I am forever grateful to you, Laurie, for this gesture. I am sure Connie is as well.

Here we are.  Already.  It has been six months since my therapist, Connie, died.  Six months since she entered into her own ultimate transformational process.

I miss her.  Deeply and profoundly.

A day has not passed when I have not shed tears because of the pain I feel over her physical absence. Some days there are only a few “splatterings” of tears lasting less than even 30 seconds; other days there are torrents that do not seem to have an end.

But there have been other tears as well.  There are times when the tears have nothing to do with sadness or pain or grief. I find myself, when in the presence of other people during these eruptions, assuring them I am not in distress.  It is just that I am in touch with such a deep place within my soul, that the only thing I seem to be able to do is cry.

Being who I am, I have begun to wonder about this phenomenon of crying.  What makes our eyes shed these tears, make it difficult to breathe and, at times, throw our bodies into convulsions?  And so I did some reading.  Mostly what is written is about how tears help our bodies shed the chemicals that result in the release of stress hormones.

But I also did some reading about crying as language.  Most of us, I think, know that babies cry to communicate.  This is, we think, because they do not yet have language. This is true enough.  Once language is acquired, we are expected to cry less.  As we grow into adulthood, tears are often interpreted as a sign of weakness.

I battle tears.  I don’t want to cry.   But I can remember countless times over the past 7 years sitting in front of Connie fighting the tears, seldom winning that fight, while she would quietly say, “Stay with it.”

In those last two months, on several occasions, Connie herself would shed a few tears while I sat across from her.  These always felt to me like sacred moments.

This is what I now know about tears.  They are not just a regression to a preverbal stage.  They are not a sign of weakness.  In fact, I have come to understand that these tears of mine are about moving beyond language.  That I am experiencing something that is beyond language and the only way that I can communicate is through tears.  These particular tears have to do with the language of my soul.

Sometimes tears communicate sadness, pain and/or grief.  Sometimes they communicate to me that my soul is open.  There are times I get annoyed because they will burst forth while I am trying to talk and they interrupt me!! I get so frustrated when I can’t speak because these tears demand to be heard instead of my voice.  Perhaps, as well, they are a way of communicating to those who have passed beyond the veil just how much we love them and always will.  How important they continue to be to our lives.

There are even times now that I feel that my tears are a result of my sense of overwhelm when I am able to feel Connie’s real presence around me.

Yes, it has been six months.  My rational side says I ought to be done with the tears by now. Part of me wants to put an end to them.

But then I hear Connie’s voice saying simply, “Stay with it,” and I know I must allow the tears to flow.

Sleepless in Rochester.

Lake Ontario

The clock continued to count down the minutes until dawn and I became somewhat irritated by the fact that the darkness was giving way to the light of day.  A day, as it turned out, that would be cloudy and windy.  The sun hidden behind clouds.

In the middle of the night somewhere a fragment of an e-mail I had written last July came to haunt me.

… as I now see it, the simple answer to the question of what would happen if I were not “special” would be that I would cease to exist. (Ok, so not so simple, really) Not only my self, but more importantly, my Self. To put this into words may seem overly dramatic, but to me it is very real. Now, I know this doesn’t mean I think I would disappear off of the face of the earth, but it does fit in with the suicidal ideation that would arise.

As the minutes continued to move through the darkness, I came to a point of being faced with the fact that my current reality is that I feel as if my connection to Self has, indeed, ceased to exist.  I very purposefully use the word “feel” here, and not “think”.  I can rationalize away all the reasons why this feeling carries no truth. But it is still how I feel.

At the root of this feeling is Connie’s death. I know that she held a special place for me in her heart — in fact, at her memorial one of her friends made a point to tell me that toward the end she was only seeing a few clients who were “special” to her. Does this “specialness” die with the death of her physical being?   She was the one person who so steadfastly held the mirror for me in which I was able to connect with my Self and with whom I experienced a twinship that also revealed Self.  And again, as much as I may be able to rationalize the ways in which she may still hold this mirror and be “twin” for me, I just do not have a felt sense that it is so.  This “felt sense” is not something that I can will into being.  It is either there, or not.

As this understanding was gathering form from the essence of the darkness of the early morning hours, I felt at the center of my being the old, familiar, dark void.  A void in which I float without direction or purpose. My first impulse is to find a way to escape from this dark place.  But if there is anything I have learned in my work with Connie it is to “Just be” and to “Stay with it.” These two admonitions had become her repeated answers in times when I was struggling and would ask what I should do or what could I read in order to deal with whatever was before me.

I remember that in the days just after her death, I was able to articulate that I did not know how to “hold” this experience.  Our society does not help us deal with the reality of death.  Does not prepare us for its inevitability.  In fact, quite the opposite is true. Our society does everything it can to make us believe that death is something we must avoid at all costs and when it finally does find us, it is as if we have somehow failed.

So I am realizing that the sleepless wanderings of my thoughts have brought me to the understanding that I am in the midst of learning how to authentically hold this experience in its fullness. Perhaps once I have adequately learned how to do this, and I do mean “adequately” and not “mastered”, I will once again have a felt sense of connection with Self.

Soul.

The following is an e-mail I sent to my therapist after what turned out to be our last session before she passed.  I share it here because it almost becomes the summation of all the work I had done with her over nearly 7 years.  In this writing I was reaching deep within myself to explain what was going on in my head during our last session which had been quite intense.  It feels at once both deeply personal and extraordinarily global.

I remember once you asking me what had drawn me to my interest in soul and soul work.  I have found myself wondering the same thing about you.  It has one of those “if there is time I will ask” questions —- there never seems to be enough time ….

I thought I would try to describe for you the image that was in my head during our last session.  Along with, I imagine, will be an attempt to describe where my concept of soul has evolved to at this particular point.  I am pretty sure it will continue to evolve.

So let me start with this:  I no longer consider that there are multiple souls or that we each have an individual soul. I believe that there only is Soul.  In Jewish tradition there is the story of G-d carrying a vessel that is shattered and and the spark of divinity with in each of us is a shard from that vessel.  Similarly, I think we all have a piece of Soul within us — and I have come think that it is this “particle of soul” that Jung came to call Self and is the base of our psyhic structure.  I keep thinking of the term “ground of being”, but I know that has a specific theological and/or buddhist meaning which may or may not coincide with my conceptual understanding.

So, in this image that has been in my head since our session, there is just this smooth surface, sort of like a floor.  The colors were all shades of white and grey …. like looking out over the horizon of a body of water on a grey day.

Then, in one spot there is like a finger pointing up …. sort of as if the surface of the water were latex and a finger was trying to poke through it.  In my image, I see only one of this finger-like things, but I imagine that there are many of these finger-like things continually rising and falling …..

I think that there is some sort of drive for the individual piece of Soul we all have to return back to Soul …. for the finger that protrudes to fall back into the “ground of being” to the “All that Is”.  The soul that was divided seeks to return to the whole.

In physics, a particle named the Higgs-Boson particle has been found.  It is considered to be that in which all else exists. Interestingly, it is also called the God-particle.

I am wondering, then, if this is why soul connections are so strong.  Could it be that when a soul connection is made, it somehow, in a small way, partially satisfies the individual’s soul “piece” need to connect back to Soul?

I remember during one of our sessions with Cecile  (my shamanic teacher) we did a journey to discover the journey our souls would take after death (although not seeing the moment of death itself).  I so clearly saw a human shape walking along shedding aspects of itself —- such as aspects of the personality grounded in it’s ego and ego defenses and eventually even the spirit of the individual until all that was left was sort of this orb of light that I understood to be the soul that would then go on to merge with The Light.

I also remember that in class 2 years ago(Archetypal Psych) with Joe Coppin I had such a strong understanding that Soul and Spirit were really two different aspects or two different paths to the same end.  The path of soul is much more about connection while spirit is about individualism.  Soul embraces, and spirit withdraws. Soul is relational and spirit is individual.  Soul is feminine, spirit is masculine.

SO —- this is all of what was running through my head in our last session …. but it was all coming in at once and we were running out of time … and in the moment it just felt like chaos.

I don’t know if any of this makes any sense to anyone else, but it is sort of my reality at this moment …..I can only believe that it  will continue to develop over time.

If you are now reading this sentence, thanks for hanging in there!!!! I know this was long….

Debbie

Her response:

10/26/13
connie donaldson

Wow.

Sent from my iPhone

A Look Back …

I am re-posting a blog entry I wrote December 21, 2008. I came across it as I was looking for posts in a private blog in which my therapist, who passed away last fall, had commented. I am reposting it mostly because it speaks to me today of the depth of the relationship we had even in the early stages of our work. I am struck by my own words are still relevant today. I am especially struck by how I seemed to have had an inherent understanding of phenomenology long before it was something I studied officially!

December 21, 2008

The following is from: Reflections on Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice

By Judith Becker Greenwald, MSW, CSW

I have found that being centered and grounded in the consulting room with the patient and allowing whatever evolves to take place in an organic way is a spiritual practice. At times, transformative shifts or revelations between therapist and patient take place that are quite unexpected and moving. I think of these as transcendent moments. I believe we can deliberately increase our capacity to be a loving spiritual presence and provide a greater likelihood for such moments to occur. In being the blessing, we are blessed.

Click here to read the full article

I really like this quote from this article.  I understand that it is written from the view of the therapist, but I think that perhaps it can go both ways.  (although, for myself, I am not sure that I see MYSELF as being much of a blessing)

Maybe neither of us in this therapeutic relationship is individually a blessing, but it is somehow the interaction, the “mingling”, if you will, of who we are that results in this sense of being blessed.

And just what is this concept of “blessing”, anyway???

After doing a quick survey of definitions of the word blessing, including it’s origins in the act of sanctification through the sprinkling of blood – a pagan rite – I think that what resonates the most for me is the idea of blessing as being an honoring or celebration or perhaps simply an experience of what it is to transcend this particular phenomenological existence.  In some ways, it is a “touching back” to what we once knew or to that place where we once existed.  In other ways, it is perhaps an anticipation of where we may be headed.  In a non-linear way of thinking, perhaps it is simply the transcendence of a linear existence.

I would like to be careful here to explain that I do not see the idea of “transcendence” as being a higher or better state of existence, but perhaps a more finely tuned conscious awareness of a way of being that is actually available to us right now, right here, in this moment.

Well, Connie, if you are ever to read this, I hope you don’t come away from it thinking I am totally “whacked”, as the saying goes ….. my gut feeling, or “felt sense” is that you will understand exactly what I am trying to say …… but I could just be projecting my desire for you to understand me … so I could be wrong …… but I  don’t think that I am ….. but that does not mean that I am not!

How does one ever really know if they are right or wrong?

Connie’s comments:

connie980 debj@yahoo.com 24.149.45.46	Submitted on 2009/01/04 at 9:46 AM I love the idea of transcendence as a more finely attuned awareness in this present moment!
connie980 debj@yahoo.com 24.149.45.46	Submitted on 2009/01/04 at 9:44 AM It is not at all “whacked”, but rather a very thought provoking description. I read it several times as I wanted to commit it to my memory bank for further processing!!

Soul.

“Academic psychology and most schools of psychotherapy do not use, or rather systematically avoid, the concept soul.”

Today’s quote is from What is Soul?  (William Giegerich, 2012, pg. 5)

A few years ago a therapist with whom I was working (Constance Donaldson) asked me what it was that drew my interest to soul and soul work.  I could not really come up with an answer at that time.  Probably still can’t.  I just know that I can trace this interest back to the age of 9.  All I could say was that I have just always felt drawn to an understanding of soul.  Somehow, as I passed the half century mark in my time on this earth this felt sense of being drawn has telescoped into a felt sense of being driven to understand soul.

While sitting in a class on archetypal psychology in 2011 during my PhD course work, I was suddenly struck by a deep sense that there is definite difference between spirit and soul.  I began to wonder how one could finish this analogy:  Spirit is to Spirituality as Soul is to _________? I started asking people how they might fill in this blank.  No one could come up with an answer.

In this same class on archetypal psychology, we were assigned to read a piece written by James Hillman entitled “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline” in Senex & Puer (2005).  I must have spent about a solid month studying the 21 pages of this piece of Hillman’s writing. Finally I had found someone who had articulated what I was sensing!  Finally I had found a reason behind why all the spiritual searching I had done for decades had left me with a sense of missing something.  My world literally pivoted with this new understanding.  I have to admit there was a part of me that could not understand why those around me did not realize the importance of my new found understanding.  Could they not see how important this was? But then I would remember my inability to answer Connie’s question when she had asked what had drawn me so specifically to soul.  For whatever reason, this is apparently was my particular conundrum to muse over.

But it has also colored the way I see psychology.  When someone asks me what depth psychology is about, I generally explain that conventional psychology deals with the mind and behavior whereas depth psychology deals with the soul. If I haven’t totally lost the person asking the question, I then go on to explain that depth psychology deals with the unconscious, both individual and collective.

This quote from Giegerich strikes me as being tragically true.  As a depth psychologist I thought it would be a good idea to join the American Psychological Association (APA).  Until I read it’s definition of psychology that gives primacy to the idea of the science of psychology.  Also, there is no subdivision of the APA for depth psychologists. There is no room for soul.

I have come to the realization that one of the charges of depth psychology is to return soul to psychology and psychotherapy.  The word psychotherapy itself means to “attend to the soul”.  I am not convinced that many individuals doing psychotherapy are aware of this or are up to the task of engaging in soul work.  I am lucky, I believe, in that I do have people around me who are aware of this charge and are indeed up to the task, but I am here to attest to the fact that working at a soul level has no shortcuts or short term, evidence based, practices. It is hard, often painful, work.

Oh — and one person did finally come up with an answer to my query of spirit is to spirituality as soul is to  _______?  Without the slightest hesitation or the need to think for a moment he simply said “Why, depth psychology, of course.”  Thank you, Dr. Edward Casey of Pacifica Graduate Institute!  I am so fortunate to have studied with you.

Note:  James Hillman was a founding professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute.  He was scheduled to meet with our class during our first quarter on campus, however he became ill and we had the dubious distinction of becoming one of the first groups of students with whom he would be unable to meet.  I was able to attend his memorial service held on campus and one of my favorite moments was when we sang him from elderhood into ancesterhood.

Describe the Scent of a Rose.

“For the religious person, God excites the mind; for the mystic, God stops it.”

Quote taken from The Mandala of Being, (Richard Moss, 2007, pg. 62)

Not too long ago I told a friend that I had come to know God.  Her response was how could that possibly be so? How could I know the mind of God?  And this is what struck me — her insertion of the word “mind”.  I had not said anything about mind — and quite purposely so.  I certainly make no claims to know the mind of God.  Rather, the knowing of God that I experience is more in the “biblical sense” of knowing.  It is more of a felt sense. It was something I could only experience when I could bring my mind to a stop and “just be”.

I was recently watching a recording of a show on mystics and I heard a story that really resonated with me.  The speaker was saying it was difficult, if not impossible, to express the essence of the smell of a rose to someone using language.  We can try to explain it and the person listening to us can try to understand, but somewhere between the telling and the hearing, something gets lost.  Now, if these two people were to smell the same rose, they would share the experience and no words would be needed.  They both share the knowing.

This is how it was with my therapist who passed over this past November.  This is what made my work with her so deep.  In some odd twist of fate, I ended up in the office a woman who had herself sniffed of the same rose of God that I had and in our talking we could share our experience and together look at it from all sorts of angles.  What a gift!

One of my favorite video clips of an interview with Carl Gustav Jung involved the off screen interviewer asking Jung if he believed in God.  I love his response.  He said he did not believe in God, he knew God. I think Jung had sniffed that same rose that Connie and I had!

It is interesting to me to have discovered that I have found more conversations about divinity in my study of depth psychology than I did while in a convent or a parish or studying theology. Now this does not surprise me so much because, after all, psychology is literally the study of the soul and therapy means to attend to soul.  When I learned to listen from my soul instead of my mind is when I came to know God.

I have to admit, in closing, that I am not often likely to use the word “God” for what I experience. I have also begun to stay away from the word “believe”.  In my understanding, belief leads room for doubt.  I have no doubt. I know God to be the Divine, the All That Is or Source of All or simply Source — or whatever way I can come up with to express the Totality that includes absolutely everything.