Distinctions

We all live within a narrative of:

• how life turns out,
• what life is for,
• what causes what,
• what’s healthy, good and true,
• how people heal

…and so on.

What do you know about the narrative(s) within which you listen?

We might be able to identify the narrative’s origin in our religious/spiritual background or practice, in the psychological/developmental theories we adhere to, in the philosophical or biological or evolutionary or sociological approaches we hold.

For example, we might believe that people are fundamentally good but blocked in their expression of that—or the opposite: humans are evil and need to be saved. Or that karma, or genetics, or early attachment, or sociological/economic forces best explain humans.

The nature of the shaping narratives is to be invisible—to be so in the background as to be out of our automatic, everyday awareness. Consequently, we must do our best to uncover our fundamental ones and look for their power in the way we listen.

I don’t know about you but I learned to pay attention to this in myself by sensing how someone else was listening to me. When I was speaking to a therapist specializing in internal family systems (the idea that we have many personalities within us), I could feel what I was saying being categorized within that framework. The facial expressions, body shape, and follow-up questions all were part of that narrative. When I spoke to some Buddhist teachers, they seemed to be listening for how my life was being shaped by greed, hate or delusion: the three poisons, three sources of human suffering according to Buddhism.

So I caught on that I might be/probably/most certainly was doing the same. And then I read the devastating book reviewed in this issue, Ethical Loneliness. In it I learned even highly trained people will usually not meet deeply traumatized people in the way those people want to be met. Instead the listener will be looking for resilience or hope or, in some cases, whom to blame or punish or what systems in the world to change.

The traumatized people often will pick up the narrative into which they are being guided and comply with that. Consequently they will be traumatized yet again because their community will not meet them—and as humans we can only become ourselves in relationship.

So I have been asking myself the questions I’ve been writing about here because I became sure that some version of what I’m saying plays out in my/our coaching.

We easily, readily believe and hold onto our background explanatory narrative, especially when it protects us from feeling the true devastation in people’s lives, what’s been genuinely, irreparably lost—or when it reinforces and defends our self-image or self-concept.

I’m speaking here about a way of relating, a way of being with others we can aspire to. We begin practicing it by deeply relaxing our impulses to help and quickly understand, because those will arrive from our background narrative. Here’s where the avid, rigorous, necessarily continuous practice comes in. The practice also calls on us to undo tension patterns in our body as they arise, keep our thoughts floating and unformed and our emotions cloud-like and ephemeral for much longer than we are used to.

Can you imagine what it would be like to listen to someone without trying to rapidly understand them or find six ways to help them?

Do we have such courage? Can we summon the necessary commitment to be open this way?

The reason to be so radically open is because when our client is met truly where they are—and not where we steer them to be by how we listen—they have the chance to be a full person, with all their dignity, depth and mystery.

Being fully met is the biggest, most powerful gift we can bring to anyone. Sooner or later—or perhaps now—you will have something devastating occur in your life. In that moment you will know deeply in your mind/heart/body that you crave genuine, unguarded, spacious, unformed contact with another person. Maybe this has already happened—don’t feel left out if it hasn’t; its coming.

The point is we can be such a point of contact. Devastating events collapse our world, our life. We feel cast out. Our usual remedies and self-soothing fail because the world in which they succeeded is gone.

What initiates the rebuilding of a life and a world is reverential listening by another person. In those moments we are less of an exile. We begin to locate who we are in this moment, not who we were before the devastation. That someone is gone.

Let’s all begin to listen this way. We can start in our everyday encounters and so be prepared, more or less, for the really difficult ones when our friends have lost their beloved or have received a terminal diagnosis.

Who do you want to be in these conversations? Perhaps it’s better not to leave it to chance but instead to begin cultivating the radical openness described here.

The book review, practice of the quarter and poetry in this issue can support you in that cultivation.

We can all step in and be the steady, welcoming presence needed during moments of devastation. And being that way is one of the most noble callings a human can engage.

Take care of yourself.

Sending love,

• Gently, quickly, and thoroughly scan your body and relax any tension patterns. Be sure to check your eyes, your jaw, your shoulders, your buttocks, your hands and feet. You can relax tension by consciously tightening each place you notice it and then releasing.
• Breathe deeply and slowly into the bottom of your belly.
• Let go of any formulations in your mind as they arise. Don’t plan what you’re going to say or connect what’s being said to an earlier conversation. Really, truly go for a mind of floating clouds.
• Also please pay as close attention as you can to your body shape and your facial expressions, and let them express a vast, radical, warm, connected spaciousness.

You can stop several times a day and check how you’re doing with this practice.

You can make a laminated card with these points and carry it with you as a reminder and prod to do it.

You can have a conversational partner who is listening the same way and practice together.

You can journal about your practice.

And you can…

Healing

D.H. Lawrence

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

To a Stranger

Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Farewell to a beloved colleague

Sandy Hogan, a 2004 graduate of the PCC, passed away peacefully on September 21 after a short battle with cancer. She was 69 years old and lived in Tucson, Arizona. She’s survived by her husband of 41 years, their two children and three grandchildren, and a host of extended family and friends.

As a leadership coach and Enneagram teacher, Sandy worked with leaders in the corporate, medical, higher education, military and nonprofit sectors, evoking the inherent greatness in influencers by connecting them to their own potential and humanity. This was her true passion and calling.

Sandy was an award-winning photographer, potter, jewelry maker and paper artist who loved making personalized gifts for her friends and family. She also loved singing, was an avid collector, and loved dogs, working tirelessly with the Humane Society and the Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen Health and Rescue Foundation.

A Celebration of Life is being planned for the spring. You can read Sandy’s full obituary here.

A grad publishes her third book of poetry

Sarah Rosenthal, who graduated from the PCC in 2015, has co-written The Grass is Greener When the Sun is Yellow with fellow poet Valerie Witte. The book engages with the work of two innovative female dancer-choreographers in a series of sonnets that are interwoven with letters between the two poets. Sarah is also the author of Manhatten (2009), Lizard (2016), and several chapbooks. Check them out if you haven’t yet! Congratulations, Sarah.

Unleashed, broken open, feelin’ fine! Congrats to the whacky and wonderful graduates of PCC “L” in San Francisco.