Story of Soul
Where this work came from…
In January of 2002 my mother died suddenly from complications to heart surgery. I had been with her for 8 days and had just arrived home when I got the call. A mother’s death is a continental divide in a human psyche. Before. After.
Her death came a few months after another continental divide of consciousness: 9/11. In New York we were still shocked and reeling. By March of 2002 a certain penny dropped inside of me: I knew I was done with my engineering career. By August I was at home, no longer commuting to New York City to an office with my name on it, no longer thinking about steel details or arguing with the men that constructed big things.
Looking back at that time, I see myself after sitting in my familiar living room chair with eyebrows knit and a stunned look on my face. I felt profoundly lost and confused after these watershed events, like I had been knocked off of a train in onto a landscape I did not know. A land without an identity. Without a map. A city blown apart, adrift in domesticity, newly stripped of a career, my mind full to the brim of questions and my heart full of things needing integration. I was a woman with four children who could have easily disappeared into the New York suburbs without a trace. Or that was the fear. I spent more time watching four children grow, saying the usual things: “don’t forget your lunch!” or “Hurry up you are about to miss the bus!”, a warning about weather or clothing. Granted I said all of those things before, but now it was all I did. I wanted to help my children grow. But I did not want not live through them. Who was I?
By October of 2002 I had finished hospice volunteer training and starting a Neo-Reichian therapy training program. Core Energetics was a body-centered training which focused almost exclusively on early human development and ideas about energy and the body. Hospice and Core were both schools for me. In one, I stole away after dinner to be with the withering bodies and far away looks of the elderly or dying. I was a student at their bedside, making notes of their words, their energy, their responses. At Core we learned about our many wounds of childhood and how the body held them. There was pelvic thrusting, stomping, shouting, kicking, shaking, sobbing and standing arm in arm in many circles. There was a lot of talk about energy and sexuality. Absolutely nothing about the aging or dying I saw in my other “school”.
Restless and curious, within a year of my “retirement” I started graduate work in Transpersonal Psychology. I read and wrote about spirituality and consciousness states. A fellow hospice worker challenged me to train as a birth doula so I could see both ends of life. I took her up on it, supporting her local volunteer doula program at our community hospital. Sue and I often found ourselves in long conversations about the psyche of Mother’s through birth, the long term effects of cesarean, and what birth taught us about life. At night, I was still going to the nursing homes. Still lost. The way that the world measures things. Blessedly, I had the luxury of this time and support from my husband and my children to do all of this. To this day, thank you Nick, Mike, Grace, Peter and Gil!
Of course I can now see that these 4 or 5 “lost years” between the end of bridge work, and finding solid ground as somatic therapist and death educator were very important training years. They were my greatest education. While the world of men and of construction taught me to develop clear, grounded thoughts, to track complex forces, to see spacially and argue clearly while being intuitive and creative, this new human work was teaching me to see deeper into life. I rediscovered different kinds of bridges, those between consciousness states, those between people. Those between what we call “life” and what we call “death”, between body and psyche. While watching my children grow, I watched one kind of change. While watching the ill and the dying change, I noticed in another predictable kind of change. Yet they were related.
During this time I often felt called to go on retreat in the mountains of Colorado, or in New Jersey. In the raw presence of Nature, more life patterns roared into consciousness. I had no idea what to do with these insights on the gradual movement of life through human beings. Were they useful for anyone? Who? Even if I answered those questions, how in the world would I express what I was seeing and feeling as motion in words or in static pictures? It took about 12 years to wrestle them from my intuitive mind into words and pictures, three more years to learn to teach them. It has taken a good 20 years to get them into writing.
What I am trying to say here is that my confused years “in the chair” set up all of the thoughts and insights I offer in this work. Isn’t it the case? That our moments of greatest loss and lostness are the holy crucible we want nothing to do with? Maybe some of you are in that crucible now. That crucible is a lot of what this work is about. It is about how life moves. How life can be trusted even through blindness about our own human life. Life moves. It carries us. We can learn to recognize its language.
