Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life

http://www.youtube.com/v/IhydyxRjujU&hl=en&fs=1&

On Fora TV Micheal Moore talks about his newest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. You can watch the interview here.

Of his movie, Moore writes on his website,

“…I’m gonna show you the stuff the nightly news will rarely show you. Ever meet a pilot for American Airlines on food stamps because his pay’s been cut so low? Ever meet a judge who gets kickbacks for sending innocent kids to a private prison? Ever meet someone from the Wall Street Journal who bluntly states on camera that he doesn’t much care for democracy and that capitalism should be our only ruling concern?

You’ll meet all these guys in “Capitalism.” You’ll also meet a whistleblower who, with documents in hand, tells us about the million-dollar-plus sweetheart loans he approved for the head of Senate Banking Committee — the very committee that was supposed to be regulating his lending institution! You’ll hear from a bank regulator why Timothy Geithner has no business being our Treasury Secretary. And you’ll learn, from the woman who heads up the congressional commission charged with keeping an eye on the bailout money, how Alan Greenspan & Co. schemed and connived the public into putting up their inflated valued homes as collateral — thus causing the biggest foreclosure epidemic in our history.

There is now a foreclosure filed in the U.S. once every seven-and-half SECONDS.

None of this is an accident, and I name the names others seem to be afraid to name, the men who have ransacked the pensions of working people and plundered the future of our kids and grandkids. Somehow they thought they were going to get away with this, that we’d believe their Big Lie that this crash was caused by a bunch of low-income people who took out loans they couldn’t afford. Much of the mainstream media bought this storyline. No wonder Wall Street thought they could pull this off…” Read the rest here

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The Lewiston and Auburn Public libraries have joined together to offer their patrons a wonderful new tool. Career Transitions, a “clear, easy-to-use, self-paced online resource that walks job-seekers through the entire process: from assessing strengths and interests, to exploring new opportunities, to improving their chances of getting a job, to finding and applying for jobs. With Career Transitions LPL and APL cardholders can:

Prepare – build, save, retrieve and update personal career information with a career toolkit

Assess – explore current skills, occupational knowledge and interests and match them with fulfilling career paths

Explore – investigate thousands of career paths, industries, locations and companies

Improve – find educational opportunities and take classes to increase hiring chances

Apply – search job listings from around the country that meet user criteria”

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I love Maine in September. I savor its gentle temperatures, mist filled mornings, and its quiet country roads. While I’ll admit that there’s a slight melancholy in the air as summer drifts relentlessly backward into the past, there’s a whiff of promise too. The leaves are beginning their spectacular turning, the apples and pumpkins grow closer to harvest with the dawn of each new day, and tomatoes hang ripe and juicy on the vine.

Autumn is a time of both abundance and disintegration, of brilliant vistas and diminishing light. In the midst of plenty, as we gather the harvest, the cooling mornings and shortened days inform us that winter is on its way. Making this transition can be particularly challenging to embrace for those of us who reside in the north country. And yet, embrace it we must if we want to participate as fully as possible in the enduring cycles of nature and in our own inevitable evolution. Everything changes, and just as whole new vistas open up in winter, I am reminded that each and every ending contains its own beginning. Transition periods whether welcomed or not very often compel us to stretch and grow, offering us a certain amount of grace if we will only try our best to meet them with acceptance and receptivity.

Joan Chittister in, “Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir observed, “Transitions complete us. We ripen. We learn. We hurt. We survive one thing after another…Then, in the end, we gain what we came to get – a kind of well worn, hard-won wisdom… the problem is that we all too seldom bother to stop and notice how much we have become in the process.” Each September finds me in a different place than I was the one before. Last year was filled with change, challenge, and celebration. This September finds me struggling to keep a healthy perspective as I slowly and faithfully work my way through grief.

Perhaps I love September so much because it symbolizes on some level crossing over a threshold. Just as the natural world begins once more its seasonal process of transformation – from summer to fall, fall to winter and finally winter to spring- we are reminded that during the course of our lives the landscape of both our bodies and our souls is altered again and yet again.

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I love Maine in September. I savor its gentle temperatures, mist filled mornings, and its quiet country roads. While I’ll admit that there’s a slight melancholy in the air as summer drifts relentlessly backward into the past, there’s a whiff of promise too. The leaves are beginning their spectacular turning, the apples and pumpkins grow closer to harvest with the dawn of each new day, and tomatoes hang ripe and juicy on the vine.

Autumn is a time of both abundance and disintegration, of brilliant vistas and diminishing light. In the midst of plenty, as we gather the harvest, the cooling mornings and shortened days inform us that winter is on its way. Making this transition can be particularly challenging to embrace for those of us who reside in the north country. And yet, embrace it we must if we want to participate as fully as possible in the enduring cycles of nature and in our own inevitable evolution. Everything changes, and just as whole new vistas open up in winter, I am reminded that each and every ending contains its own beginning. Transition periods whether welcomed or not very often compel us to stretch and grow, offering us a certain amount of grace if we will only try our best to meet them with acceptance and receptivity.

Joan Chittister in, “Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir observed, “Transitions complete us. We ripen. We learn. We hurt. We survive one thing after another…Then, in the end, we gain what we came to get – a kind of well worn, hard-won wisdom… the problem is that we all too seldom bother to stop and notice how much we have become in the process.” Each September finds me in a different place than I was the one before. Last year was filled with change, challenge, and celebration. This September finds me struggling to keep a healthy perspective as I slowly and faithfully work my way through grief.

Perhaps I love September so much because it symbolizes on some level crossing over a threshold. Just as the natural world begins once more its seasonal process of transformation – from summer to fall, fall to winter and finally winter to spring- we are reminded that during the course of our lives the landscape of both our bodies and our souls is altered again and yet again.

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   The following is a poem by artist and social activist, Rashani
that I find to be both beautiful and powerful entitled, There is a Brokenness.

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.

-Rashani,1991
You can visit her website at http://rashani.com/

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We’re born to create, each and every one of us. I’m not necessarily talking about painting, or poems or novels, although I am talking about works of art. Each of us makes the painful and profound journey down our mother’s dark birth canal and onto a waiting canvas. That canvas is our lives.

We’re not presented at birth with our fair share of resources, nurturing, or opportunities upon our arrival, but we do each receive all that we require in the way of teachers. These teachers school our souls even while at the same time they may break our hearts.

Frederick Buechner in, Our Fiction or our Faith wrote, “There is something deep within us, in everybody, that gets buried and distorted and confused and corrupted by what happens to us. But it is there as a source of insight and healing and strength. I think that is where art comes from.”

Our once empty canvas doesn’t promise beauty or wisdom or meaning. An empty canvas doesn’t promise much. But the world that holds it is overflowing with possibility, more than enough for us to create meaning, and beauty, and wisdom.

It’s entirely up to us.

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We’re born to create, each and every one of us. I’m not necessarily talking about painting, or poems or novels, although I am talking about works of art. Each of us makes the painful and profound journey down our mother’s dark birth canal and onto a waiting canvas. That canvas is our lives.

We’re not presented at birth with our fair share of resources, nurturing, or opportunities upon our arrival, but we do each receive all that we require in the way of teachers. These teachers school our souls even while at the same time they may break our hearts.

Frederick Buechner in, Our Fiction or our Faith wrote, “There is something deep within us, in everybody, that gets buried and distorted and confused and corrupted by what happens to us. But it is there as a source of insight and healing and strength. I think that is where art comes from.”

Our once empty canvas doesn’t promise beauty or wisdom or meaning. An empty canvas doesn’t promise much. But the world that holds it is overflowing with possibility, more than enough for us to create meaning, and beauty, and wisdom.

It’s entirely up to us.

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There is a new online support group for those who suffer from PTSD. You can find it here. You do need to register in order to participate however registration is free.

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In Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood”, Wayne Muller observed that those who suffered in childhood, while baring painful scars, invariably exhibit exceptional strengths including remarkable insight, creativity, and a profound inner wisdom. He challenges those of us who have suffered to not perceive ourselves as broken and damaged, nor to disown those dark and wounded places in ourselves, but instead to work to reawaken that which is wisest, strongest and whole within us.

In working with victims of childhood trauma, Muller noted that while still haunted by the past, many also develop an acute sensitivity to others as well as a tendency to seek beauty, love and peace. He writes, “Seen through this lens, family sorrow is not only a painful wound to be endured, analyzed and treated. It may in fact become a seed that gives birth to our spiritual healing and awakening.”

It’s been my own experience as a therapist that this is often the case with survivors of childhood trauma. While not all survivors with whom I’ve worked possess the characteristics that Muller so respectfully describes, I’m almost always touched by their strength and depth. Each person has brought to therapy his or her own uniques skills, stories, and beauty – gifts that truly seemed to be forged to a significant degree in the flames of the very pain they now seek to escape.

Muller assures the reader that suffering and pain are not exceptions to the human condition. Instead they are inevitable threads that make up the tapestry of a life. He cautions us to not become entangled in our memories of childhood suffering – to not let our pain resonate throughout the whole of our lives. He also points out that many of us would prefer to explain our hurt rather than to feel it. He advises that we acknowledge our pain, allow ourselves to experience it, and then to look for the lessons it will inevitably teach if we only look and listen, particularly to the wisdom contained within the depths of our very own souls.

While I never, under any circumstances want to minimize or justify the pain of another, nor suggest that anyone be grateful for their suffering, I do try to gently suggest (when he or she is ready) that even the most painful path can be a pathway to possibilities not yet discovered.

There have been many hurtful experiences in my own life that I would have adamantly refused to face had I been given the choice, I am also aware that to deny the value of the message, in spite of how painful the lesson or unwelcome the messenger, only serves to add insult to injury. If you have no choice for the time being but to travel a difficult path, at the very least, why not claim all possible compensations along the way?

Read Full Post »

In Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood”, Wayne Muller observed that those who suffered in childhood, while baring painful scars, invariably exhibit exceptional strengths including remarkable insight, creativity, and a profound inner wisdom. He challenges those of us who have suffered to not perceive ourselves as broken and damaged, nor to disown those dark and wounded places in ourselves, but instead to work to reawaken that which is wisest, strongest and whole within us.

In working with victims of childhood trauma, Muller noted that while still haunted by the past, many also develop an acute sensitivity to others as well as a tendency to seek beauty, love and peace. He writes, “Seen through this lens, family sorrow is not only a painful wound to be endured, analyzed and treated. It may in fact become a seed that gives birth to our spiritual healing and awakening.”

It’s been my own experience as a therapist that this is often the case with survivors of childhood trauma. While not all survivors with whom I’ve worked possess the characteristics that Muller so respectfully describes, I’m almost always touched by their strength and depth. Each person has brought to therapy his or her own unique skills, stories, and beauty – gifts that truly seemed to be forged to a significant degree in the flames of the very pain they now seek to escape.

Muller assures the reader that suffering and pain are not exceptions to the human condition. Instead they are inevitable threads that make up the tapestry of a life. He cautions us to not become entangled in our memories of childhood suffering – to not let our pain resonate throughout the whole of our lives. He also points out that many of us would prefer to explain our hurt rather than to feel it. He advises that we acknowledge our pain, allow ourselves to experience it, and then to look for the lessons it will inevitably teach if we only look and listen, particularly to the wisdom contained within the depths of our very own souls.

While I never, under any circumstances want to minimize or justify the pain of another, nor suggest that anyone be grateful for their suffering, I do try to gently suggest to my clients (when they are ready to consider the suggestion) that even the most painful path can be a pathway to possibilities not yet discovered.

There have been many hurtful experiences in my own life that I would have adamantly refused to face had I been given the choice. I am also aware that to deny the value of the message, in spite of how painful the lesson or unwelcome the messenger, only serves to add insult to injury. If you have no choice for the time being but to travel a difficult path, at the very least, why not claim all possible compensations along the way?

Read Full Post »