THE GRAIL IN YOUR LIFE

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A young man was married to a woman struggling with drug addiction. She was unable to care for their infant son, he worked on a construction site all day, and his family was in another state. One night in the midst of a terrible fight, he looked in his son's crib and saw that the baby was shaking. In desperation, carrying his child, the following night he went to a support group for people living with a family member's addiction. Beyond all rational explanation, he began to feel hope, and even more surprising, he got the idea to take his baby to work. The foreman's wife set up a tiny nursery in the management shed and other women came in to help. The young man began to experience kindness in people he had never before known.

A woman with Stage IV cancer diagnosis walked along a beach contemplating suicide. When a starfish with a broken point scurried up the sand to catch a wave, she recognized the presence of the grail. She chose to live, and to live well. To her his meant taking the necessary care of herself and sharing her journey with others. She bought a starfish pin and wore it near her heart to remind herself that she had learned the lesson of love from a starfish.

A community was bereft when a beloved neighbor, a firefighter, died on 9/11. One night at a community meeting, the discussion inspired a novel idea: he was a gardener and to memorialize him, they would build a community in their small park. Today, "Pete's Garden" blooms with annuals and perennials in the summer and is stays green with pines in the winter; people relax on the benches, and strangers became forever friends. 

These are the grail moments--the small or huge insights, ideas, and openings that shift our reality, heal our suffering, and transform our lives. The grail is life itself.

THE LEGEND OF THE GRAIL

The Holy Grail was the chalice use to collect Christ's blood from where he hung on the cross, and it was buried with him. When his tomb was opened three days later, both the living Christ and the grail were gone.

Over the centuries, the grail has come to symbolize that which heals all wounds. Less an object than a shift of mind, the grail represents the moment when a small life opens up to a greater reality in which we live but rarely see. These are the moments when we receive help from a more than human source, when we feel fully alive and flowing with life, and as a result are enabled to take inspired, life-generating action. You don't have to believe in a god to experience these transcendent moments; the imagination will do.

I have found that the old stories passed down among generations contain the healing we so long for now in our personal and collective lives. The great teacher Jean Houston observes in A Mythic Life that the Arthurian legend of Parsifal can show us how to transform modern breakdown into breakthrough.  

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Parsifal was a young and untested knight (the name Parsifal can be translated as fool or innocent) who finds himself in a wasteland where everything was crumbling and all living things were dying -- flowers no longer bloomed, rivers had dried up, animals and people were sick in body and spirit. This was the kingdom of the Fisher King, a monarch who suffered from an unknown illness caused by a wound in his leg; his illness had infected the land and no one knew how to cure it. 

Directed to a castle that suddenly manifested within a mist, that night Parsifal saw a magnificent chalice, glowing brighter than all the candles in the hall, being carried back and forth by a beautiful young woman. This chalice was the Holy Grail. Throughout the ages, the Grail became known as the container of the life force that healed all wounds. Parsifal vowed to find out the secret of the Grail the next day. But when he woke up the following morning, the castle was empty; there was not a soul around to ask. Seized with fear, Parsifal jumped on this horse and rode back across the drawbridge just as it was rising and the castle was becoming enshrouded in mist.

For many years after that, Parsifal wandered in a dark forest, trying to find his way back to the Grail Castle by sorting through the tangled roots. During this time, he had many adventures, but he lived without passion, longing for the joy he had felt for one night, in what seemed to be a dream. But these years were not really about loss; they forced the knight to go on an inner journey as well as an outer one. What he lost was his innocence, naivete, and his unconsciousness. What he gained was simplicity, clarity, and maturity. Like a blade, he was sharpened in the fire of adversity. 

Finally, one day he asked a simple question: “Where is the grail? Whom should it serve?”

With that question, life opened: the earth turned green, waters flowed, the drawbridge to the Grail Castle lowered, the ailing Fisher King was healed, and the kingdom too was restored to health. The Grail was brought out of the castle to serve the world.

The message of the grail legend is that healing is possible. We heal as we serve. 

One path to our own Grail is to discover our deep story and share it with caring others. At the same time, as the myth tells us, we begin the healing of our broken land.

Ask Yourself:

1. How does the Parsifal myth translate into your experience? Write yourself into the myth to find your own grail path. Play with it: rewrite the myth from the different perspectives of Parsifal, the ailing king, the Grail itself, and the land -- both in its dying time and in its rebirth. 

2. What is the question you need to ask? Try a few on the page and see where they lead.

3. A story isn't over until it is told. Share your transforming insight, if you have one, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem, with someone who cares.

4. What do you take from this exercise? What needs to happen? And what is the smallest, least difficult step you can take into a larger life? 

A new path beckons. One in which you are not alone, but now part of a life-giving grid of fellow seekers of their own Grails.



All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2018. Excerpt from book in progress.

FIERCE PRACTICE: FACING UP TO THE TERRORISTS WITHOUT AND WITHIN

A PLOT FOR OUR TIME

This post is about the really hard stuff, which we have to face if we're going to move forward in truth--collectively and in our personal lives. 
            The 2012 film, “The Attack,” directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri haunts me still. It is a tragic quest tale in a contemporary setting, concerning the painful modern issues with which we are so familiar. The object of the quest is an answer to the questions we routinely ask in the face of evil: Who was this person, and how could they do this? And the next equally terrifying question: Am I complicit?

            The film’s protagonist, Amin, is a highly successful and assimilated Arab surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, well loved by his Jewish colleagues. His privileged world is shattered when a suicide bombing kills 17 children at a birthday party in a popular café. Horrifically, the bomber turns out to be his own wife. Once released from police interrogation and the shock worn off, he decides to discover the truth about this woman Sihem, with whom he had shared a loving marriage—or so he thought—for 15 years. His quest is a classic heroic journey plot that takes him away from the white buildings and orderly avenues of Tel Aviv to the ancient, teeming village of Nablus on the West Bank.

            Ever deeper and higher he climbs through the old stone streets; through shocking conversations with his relatives, who express pride in Sihem’s martyrdom; through being tossed out of a local mosque by men who are enraged with this secular Arab’s violation of their sanctuary; until he finally ascends the steps of a church where he confronts the radical cleric who was Sihem’s mentor. Cold and implacable as he lights candles for the evening service, the priest tells Amin, “Your trip here is a waste of time. I have nothing to say to you. We have nothing to discuss.”

            “The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is subjugated, left powerless and voiceless, and in thrall to a charismatic leader who exploits their hatred for the oppressive system.

            Following this encounter, one truth after another emerges as Amin discovers that not only was his own nephew part of the plot, but that the Tel Aviv cell used his own apartment for planning sessions while he was at his hospital. At the end of this heart-wrenching encounter, his nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.

            Watching it, he sees that Sihem tried to call him before she left on her mission. Unable to speak with him, she wept and called his name. He is left not with a why, but with the knowledge that there was humanity in this woman after all: she betrayed him and she loved him. Amin becomes a man in possession of a more terrible truth: his unknowing complicity in this crime through his blind self-absorption in his career. Tragically, he ends his quest as a divided soul, belonging nowhere in his bifurcated world. We last see him in flashback, standing at the bus station where he dropped Sihem off for what he thought was a trip to see her grandfather. “Every time you leave, I die a little,” he says. Amin’s entire life and identity has died.

The film is built around everything that makes story a powerful vehicle of self-expression in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity of reality, the both/and over the either/or view of life. Later, at a café across the street from New York’s famed cultural complex, Lincoln Center, in a neighborhood much like the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film, I sat with a friend pondering the questions the film doesn’t answer: How could he not know? Where will it all end? We ended our conversation hours later with our personal memories of betrayal and questioning our own complicity in our country’s oppression and war-mongering. 

FIERCE PRACTICE: GIVING SAFE VOICE TO THE MONSTER

I returned home in a self-reflective mood. My life as an adult has been dedicated to peace; in my work I create safe environments—I call them “story sanctuaries”—where through writing, sharing and listening, people are able to create coherent inner lives and warm, resonant relationships with others.

            Yet, when I sat down to write in my journal and on impulse rewrote Amin’s meeting with the radical cleric, taking the role of the priest, the language of hatred and contempt for the privileged and unconscious visitor who violated my space flowed easily. Perhaps it came from my anger and disgust with the U.Ss government for which I was writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps my deep well of anger came from trying to thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated journalism industry, or from the forgotten adults who had dismissed me as a girl child, the layers and layers of disgust that had piled up over a lifetime. Whatever its roots, I realized that I had the potential for rage within me, just as you might—more than even I knew, even with the many years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since a serious depression in 1989.

            Giving expression to those walled off feelings opened the channel to a wellspring of emotions and memories that I had erased from conscious memory. Feeling the pain while writing in the metaphor of a terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing in my familiar voice, was at first a relief and then liberation into a deeper vulnerability and love for myself and others. I felt emboldened by my writing, as I always do when I spill the truths that only my writing voice knows and reveals through the metaphors of character, place and plot of story. I subsequently became conscious of the almost imperceptible hints of this shadow reality in my daily life: the aversion I felt so easily and the way I cut off people who I perceived had hurt me, the subtle ways in which I tended to narrow my life to an aloof existence up a long flight of stairs—as disconnected from visceral inner pain as from my neighbors.

ON YOUR PATH OF TRUTH

            My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings. All of us tend to suppress the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film locks up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders, only to reap the violent results of violent denial in times of change, when we are stripped of our defenses, much like the naked trees, stripped of leaves, reveal their essential shapes in winter. The truth is, we cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we make that hard journey to the abode of our inner monsters.

            When we invite a better life for self and world, we meet old selves that once upon a time were hurt or crumpled, and that remain as frozen places in body, mind, and spirit  in ourselves, and regressive attitudes and actions in the world, such as falling in thrall to Destroyers who pass themselves off as leaders. These unconscious, icy selves keep us stuck in, old stories that no longer serve. The work of emergence becomes to welcome these uninvited members back to the story fire, listen to their stories without being pulled into reliving them, and hold their space within the circle until they can absorb the warmth of fully aligned living. We are left with a raw heart, but no longer the demonizing story that has damaged people and planet collectively and crippled our individual lives and sabotages our dreams.
     Ask yourself:

• What is trying to emerge here?
• What is being asked of me?

       The next time you are waylaid by a monster in your outer or inner life, know that you are coming close to your highest possibility; you are being awakened to the fact that your perspective is too narrow. The monsters without and within are in reality agents of destiny--challenging us to stay with it, preparing us to break through to a deeper self and higher reality.

         The ancient tellers and shamans understood that hearts break not to suffer but to open to a deeper and more numinous stream of life. The stand-out moment in a story, the strangest part of a dream, or a series of coincidences can be a sign for the truth that is struggling to emerge. “One thing that comes out in the myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation,” Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers in their conversations on the power of myth. “The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”[1]

            Know that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now on your unique path.           

            Here, in this place of utmost difficulty, you will find your grail.

[1]Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. 44.

© Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. 2018, Excerpt from forthcoming book

NEXT STORY SANCTUARY: LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

VIA 4 Powerful Ways to Use Storytelling LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

Monday, July 16 8-9:30 eastern Free and online The one gift I can see in these horrific times is the emergence of powerful healing communities at the grassroots and global levels. We are taking our destinies out of the hands of a government that doesn't care about the people and entrusting them to small communities of people who do care -- both locally and globally through the wonders of the internet. These Story Sanctuaries are intended to be a place for building a grid of deeply caring people and communities. To me, there's no more powerful way to build community than to sharing our stories. Story (an artistic re-imagining of our lives) offers both a narrative through-line moving ever forward like a river to the sea, and a great maternal container that holds all of life in a moment -- light, shadow, yearning, resisting, external obstacles, looking forward, looking back, and being grounded in the present. Whether you are interested in writing your story or living through it resiliently, this session will focus on deconstructing and reconstructing the moments you are living into an emerging through-line that can bring you home to your calm center. These groups are small and people have begun registering for this one. To register, please write julietbrucephd@gmail.com. I will send you my Zoom Room link a few days before. Image: via 4 Powerful Ways to Use the Art of Storytelling

ROW BEYOND THE ROCKS My book in progress: A Write of Passage: In the Darkness, a Story Path Home Authors Guild Website: The Story Zone "Everything is clear now: why I had to go there, why things happened the way they did, what I learned and how I changed. But at the beginning of this tale, on a sun-burnished September day in 1994, I stood before a locked iron door to a maximum security unit for criminally insane male inmates–killers, rapists, kidnappers and burglars declared not guilty by reason of insanity, and incarcerated here until at some undetermined date they were deemed safe to return to the community. The door held a peculiar message. Once upon a time, it had read "Welcome to Ward 10," in contac paper letters attached just below the barred window. By the time I arrived, the "l" had fallen out and faded blue letters spelled, "We come to Ward 10." I noted it with some unease, but followed my escort with a spirit of adventure over the threshold into the unit." ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, Juliet Bruce, PhD, 2018.

WANT TO WORK PRIVATELY WITH ME OR BOOK A TALK OR STORY SANCTUARY FOR YOUR GROUP? I am available for professional trainings, community, family, and individual sessions. Please visit my Living Story practice website for more information on content and fees. Living Story I will be giving a talk at the Jung Institute/NYC on "The Firebird: Exploring Depression as Transformational Ground through Story" on Oct. 2, 12:30-1:30.