'“I want to suggest that our old maps are limited and becoming brittle. I invite you to a conversation and into the task of drawing a better, and more flexible map for human healing. Bringing old maps together in new ways, we sometimes discover new worlds. And we may even, by chance, find tools for uniting the zillion unnecessary splits in our consciousness and our world.”
January 1, 2023
This morning I find myself pondering the strange, and wonderful worldwide phenomenon of celebrating "A New Year" (whenever it is). This human thing that we do in most every culture fascinates me more as I age, not less.
In one way this projection on time and the sun of something ending and something else beginning is kind of arbitrary, and…weird. We create a numbering system, and a calendar, then celebrate its repetition as if it is real?
And yet every New Year's Eve and Day I feel something. A moment to honor and release trials, maybe. A small place to make space for my longing and wishes for this life. However arbirary it may seem and whenever it happens, it is a birth/death ritual. AKA a celebration of life that fills some human need to practice the movement of our lives into possibility. To mourn, to hope, to pray, to visualize, to honor, to thank, acknowledging that we are being moved day to day, month to month, year to year. Together.
Humans fill these days with ridiculous and wonderful and corny things. In a way it puts our absurdity on full display. Hats and hooters? A ball on Times Square that drops (?!?!). In Colombia (where I was last year), there were all kinds of rituals: eating a grape and making a wish for every month. Running around the block with a suitcase at midnight if you want to travel in the year. Wearing different color underwear for different wishes (money, love etc). The picture above is my granddaughter Oli in Colombia joining the awesome festivities for the first time. I mean we are a rather ridiculous species, but also a wonderfully hopeful and creative one. And maybe indulging our imagination in ritual changes things.
In some cultures the New Year is very sacred. I can remember in 1980, seeing the Zen monks on TV in Japan striking the huge gongs and feeling the chill of it. Still, severe and deep as it was, it was also the theater of an arbitrary, ordinary moment.
For me, my pen and my journal, as well as fire and water have been wonderful companions for the annual moment. When I lived in New York we had a stream and a fire pit by our house. Fires, guitars, singing with neighbors, champagne and the lighting of little walnut boats for the water were part of our rituals. As I age, sometimes I meditate alone, or create something with others to support and celebrate our shared journey. I really love this created island where I can feel my gratitude and renew my faith in life.
This year we are waiting for the birth of a new family member who is LITERALLY due to be born on the New Year's Eve (still waiting but any minute). I am sure that she will carry this felt, worldwide, expectant and hopeful energy forever as part of her journey.
Wherever you are, however and whenever you do it, may you find another one or two, in body or in spirit, to say thank you to, and to renew the life that is within you. It is some strange birthright to do this. And we all share it.
Sharing an old poem below. And so many blessings for 2023
The vessel of longing is cracked against the side of a new ship
like every moment, really
but this one we agree to call
Different.
Suppose for one moment
there are no more births
only this one cup,
this one unfolding
spinning like a lost planet burning itself into light.
This one present where the past
and the future
rushing together from opposite directions
Collide,
forming the body and bone that is you.
Bring your full or broken cups
to this altar of creation
Speak,
Sing your praises.
by Jeanne Denney
In 2019 I enrolled in graduate school for social work after 5 years in a corporate environment and one year of SoULL. That fall, while in Year 2 of SoULL, I interned at a middle school counseling students from the ages of 10-12. SoULL teachings guided my work, enabling me to see and connect to these young human beings. This was in part due to my “teaching assistants”: the plants that I had in my office.
During most sessions, I would ask my students to water the plants. We spoke about life, growth and the energy within all living things. For example, one student was processing the recent death of his aunt and his fear of death. I spoke about the energy that goes into creating the plant that helps it grow, but also what happens after it blooms. We traced the energy moving back into the earth. I helped him see how this is a natural life process, which prompted further questions of death and dying. He asked if it’s the same flower that blooms the following spring. Instead of answering him, I asked what he thought. He said he thought it was the same or at least part of them was in the soil. We then went on to discuss his aunt and process what he wanted to say to her. He expressed creatively through drawing, and left it underneath one of the plants in my room. This is just one example of how SoULL teachings assisted my students in learning and healing.
In March of 2020, when COVID-19 forced the world to shutdown, my time counseling came to an abrupt end. There was no time to process the changes with my students or say goodbye. I was heartbroken. Though the situation was beyond anyone’s control, I felt I had failed them. It felt like a death to me. Ultimately, I recognized that I was grieving our loss of connection, and needed space to process our ending. These kids had so bravely opened up to me about their lives. They taught me how to sit with others who are struggling and in pain. It was truly an exchange. I consider them some of my greatest teachers.
SoULL taught me that a relationship doesn’t disappear when people aren’t in each other’s presence. I had also learned that while we may not always get the ending we want, we can still be empowered to have a good ending, even after a bad one. Continuing the flow of energy between people in relationships, instead of cutting off, we may find it isn’t an ending after all.
I decided to process my experience with each of my students on my own by writing them each a letter reviewing the work we had done, and expressing what they had taught me. I shared my view of them, recalled their strengths, dreams, and hopes for the future. Once all the letters were completed, I went through each and read it to them as if they were sitting in front me. I sensed an immediate grounding and settling in my body. I believe that they heard me on some level.
These teachings guided me both in working with students and grappling with the after effects of an abrupt and unexpected shift in relationships with my students. I am forever grateful that I was able to process all of the work and connection experienced throughout the school year.
Banner image by Gryffyn M. on Unsplash, featured images courtesy of Jackie Kelly and Haverstraw Elementary
When I started to teach SoULL material back in 2014, I did not actually know what these teachings would do for people. I just knew I had received it, and if I did not get it out of myself I might self-combust. That was motivation enough to start teaching! By 2017 I gathered a few students and tried to teach it. I had as much curiosity as they had. Would anyone else understand it? Would it have an effect? Now I know a whole lot more. I know that the teacing provides helpers and healers a powerful and unique lens for people to see life. It has expanded awareness, comfortability with others in crisis, with students’ own life processes, and their capacity to be present. That was pretty great.
By last fall the leadership group wanted to do more. We wanted to help train new helping professionals. We had the theory, somatic principles, experience and techniques to support with the picture of whole life. We knew how to do it. There was just one problem. What would our students call themselves? What would we train them to offer?
Would we be training somatic therapists? Yes. In a way (…but “therapy” has a long history of struggle with academics, psychoanalysists, the politics of accredation and medical insurance). Would we be training coaches (as in life coaches)? Yes in a way (…but “coaching” was so goal oriented). Would we use the word “practitioner”? Kind of cold and clinical. All three ideas were, frankly, felt very masculine and from a model we hoped to change. We hoped to describe something simpler, more organic, more human, and possibly more traditionally feminine. Then we remembered the word Doula.
Such a simple and beautiful idea. Doula. The one who serves to support great life transitions. One who sits at bedsides, who holds the hand, bringing know-how, clarity, tools, calm, support and deep observation. One who holds a container. Importantly, a doula also holds a map of life transition, even as she supports freedom of choice and agency.
To date this word “Doula” had been used mainly for birth and more recently death. I have been both a birth and death doula myself. These experiences gave me some of my own greatest teaching. But I was also a body centered (somatic) therapist, helping people in ALL kinds of transitions: coming of age, retirement, parenting, adolescence, early work lives, mating, marriage… They followed the same clear principles.
I saw an opportunity to help natural healers of any kind support other people in any of the birth/death process of life. We would use whole life somatic principles, the gifts of nature, the art of presence, and the tools of practical support. Because the life force itself can be understood and supported. Because there are so many births and deaths in life. A “Whole Life Doula” is an expansion of a more limited doula idea (ONE process), but its central tennant is active in all of these processes, and they can be learned.
Learning to support and guide the soul and psyche through the life span can't be a short course. It isn't. We support people in a community setting over three years, or 400 hours of training. We help real healers and creatives give genuine, heartful service to life processes. Not just the one. The many.
These understandings are everyone’s birthright, but have most often been received and carried by women. Does it need to be said that this knowledge is of the deep feminine? Women are the main participants in SoULL so far, but I want to say loudly: this is not just for women. Men and folks of any gender: Please come on in! We so need you to learn this language and be advocates. This is different than the authority based, corporate care of the medical and social work systems. It springs from a different way of being.
Ironically, years ago I wrote a poem (below) for one of my therapists who happened to be male. I did not know that I was describing what I would train students to do one day. I did not see it coming. Maybe this poem still says it best. Isn’t this holding so much of what we long for personally? And isn’t this the perspective we will need to learn to renew life on earth? I hope some of you seek and find these skills. Because life is too short not to give your gifts, or find a map with true North on it.
The Doula
At first you only watch for the movements of the busy physician
until you notice the silent presence near you
at the pivot of the spinning room
and your eyes that keep retreating there
He was like this. Like a large bosomed widow sitting at the bedside nodding
or gazing placidly at the broad knuckles of her folded hands
Within the prayers of this kind of church woman
there is an old voice humming a song that has never become common
If you are lucky, one sits by your bedside
holding the rare vessel of acceptance
within your labor, your illness, your birth
your dying
folding your song of suffering indifferently into pleats
of a great black dress
or her apron with pockets
always made from the same pattern
If you call out, sometimes you find one there
forgiving your painful body of stories with a vacant focus,
because she has always known your family line
and it is not different now
than it ever has been
Here, I have a wish for you:
May one of these sit with you too in those long hours that come
during the mourning of your next beginning
-Jeanne Denney
Cover image by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash
