HECATE'S DAUGHTER: LISTENING FOR THE CRIES OF THE WORLD

This is from an old 2018 blog post, never more relevant than today.

Hecate, goddess of thresholds, mystery, magic, and the moon, via Jean Bakula, www.jeanbakula@exemplore.com

Silence. 

Beautiful, deep, alive silence.

Outside, rattle and roar of wind against windows. Inside, the quiet of a hundred people sitting in meditation, inhaling, exhaling the peace of this space. Dozens of small story fires radiate through candle flames. A carved wooden statue of Avalokitashvara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, stands on the altar, as loose and graceful as an unfurling wave. 

It's New Year's Eve. Twenty blocks north is Times Square, with its screaming millions. Here, a different plane, one that I've been craving. I have chosen to welcome my new year at the annual New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care sit with other like-minded, softhearted New Yorkers trying to get through these noisy and scary times with equanimity. 

Why here? I am attracted to ZenCare's mission of offering solace and companionship to suffering people, including those at the end of their lives. During their dharma talks this evening, the two guiding teachers, Robert Chodo Cambell and Koshin Paley Ellison, invite us to lay aside resolutions, which we'd be sure to fall away from by mid-January. Instead, they ask us to consider a quality we want to embody and nourish in our world in 2018. They suggest that embodying is an expression of giving birth, bringing a gift from within ourselves, is a Divine Feminine way of stepping into the new year rather than the conventional patriarchal notion of reaching out or making something happen in the material world.

I exhale. This is an easy one for me. 

Listening. It is what I do, have always done, since I was a pesky little girl tugging on my father’s pants leg: “Tell me a story, Daddy.” I have been saying virtually the same thing – tell me a story – ever since, as a comparative literature student, a reporter, and since 1994, a healing story counselor. “Tell me your story.”  

Given this luscious time to remember and visualize listening, I know with certainty that in 2018,  I want to be able to listen more deeply to the stories life is telling through clients, the places I walk through, environments in which I live, friends, family memories, new adventures, and through through my pen on the page. To listen more deeply to whatever is calling to be born in that moment. 

What quality are you embodying this year? Can you give it a visual metaphor?

Mine is Hecate, goddess of thresholds, magic, mystery, and the moon, the one who lives at a crossroads outside of town, listening for the cries of lost souls.

When I first started my Living Story practice in the world's most lost and forgotten places,, I read a lot about myth and fairy tale, because ordinary language was inadequate to contain and express that experience. Two goddesses especially resonated with me, both of them transformational: Aphrodite and Hecate. Transformation through love, and transformation through deep listening and intuition. Lighthearted listening through delight, love, and playfulness, and deep listening to the call of the world's suffering.

Through the years, as I have listened to more stories, and especially in the last year, as I have faced personal challenges and my country has slid into a sorrowful place, Hecate is the spirit and the energy that most guides my practice. A mature female goddess whose wisdom comes from lived experience, Hecate is the goddess who hears the cries of lost souls and guides them home. 

I found the image at the top of this post on google and followed it to the website that houses writer-astrologer Jean Bakula’s blog, jeanbakula@exemplore.com. Briefly, Bakula notes that Hecate’s three-headed dog represents her ability to see past, present, and future. In my practice, Hecate’s way of knowing comes through story, which creates coherence between the present moment, the past that has led us to this place, and the future possibilities latent in any situation. From my own reading, The serpent head at the top of her staff represents higher consciousness, and broomsticks represent the sweeping away of threshold hindrances. 

Most important to me about the energy of Hecate is that she brings the quality of listening to the world. It was Hecate who could not see but who heard Persephone’s cries from the underworld to which she had been abducted by Hades. It was Hecate who called upon an army of other gods to rescue the buried child, and it was Hecate who remained Persephone’s companion throughout her life, even when she returned every six months to take up her role as Queen of the Underworld, guiding those who had fallen there back to the light. 

I want to manifest Hecate's energy ever more fully this year. 

The evening concludes with the ringing of a bell 108 times for the 108 gates of liberation and the 108 hindrances, which in Buddhist tradition are the same. Reverberating with the deep clear tones of the bell and my personal intention, I walk out into the night both grounded and lifted. Struggling against the frigid winds to the subway, past other stragglers going to their midnight destinations, filled with new energy, knowing that my path this year is about bringing forth more deeply the quality of listening – for the story beneath the story, the story that wants to emerge – in my life, yours, my world, yours, ours. 

Are you listening to the story your life is telling you?

In every moment we’re at a crossroads: past and future are right here with us in the present. We’re always being asked to let go of the past by telling its story, and to choose a direction forward. The fact is that we’re given difficult situations to help us grow — not to overcome  problems, but to ripen and blossom through them; to look and listen more deeply into ourselves and our experience; to discover strengths, gifts, and a degree of commitment to life that demands more than we knew we possessed. 

Your personal world and its mood. The environments in which we find ourselves or choose to live often mirror our internal landscape. What does your world look and feel like? What features stand out for you? In my own recent life, I’ve lived in a series of rooms that aren’t my home. They reflect the major life transition I’ve been traveling through since my mother’s death five years ago. When I understand my experience this way, I feel not homeless and anxious, but calm and focused on listening for what is trying to come forth and what is being asked of me now.

Your supporting cast. Who's with you and who matters? I’m sure you’ve heard it said that everyone we meet is a teacher. This is true. The characters who populate our lives affirm and lift us, or denigrate and deplete us. Remembering that all the world’s a stage, and that the people whom we meet outside are often reflections of characters in ourselves, who uplifts and energizes you? Who sabotages you? Understand that we are all made up of light and shadow energy; your hero and your "villain" can be the same person. I have met both companions and adversaries during my life, and I am careful now, as I grow older and want my time to be spent more meaningfully, to identify and travel with the light-bearers who energize and inspire me.

What perplexing situations or yearnings are calling for your attention now? 
What are they asking of you?   
What do you need?

------

NEXT FREE ONLINE STORY FACILITATION TRAINING FOR CHANGE-MAKERS:
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9
8-9:30 PM EASTERN
(FEATURING A TRUE HOLIDAY-THEMED TALE
REGISTER AT julietbrucephd@gmail.com

All rights reserved, 2019, Juliet Bruce, PhD 

FACILITATING HEALING STORY SANCTUARIES IN AWFUL TIMES

One of the most effective things we can do as healers, activists, teachers, and individuals who want to make a positive difference is to create sanctuaries for others to gain a fresh perspective on their life, and to find and share their own experience in these times of wild change. We are not afraid to responsibly express our own truth.

Please join me on Tuesday, October 29, at 8-9:30 pm eastern for a brief and easy introduction to facilitating healing story sanctuaries. It's free and online. Write to me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com for the link and to inquire about my availability to help you or your organization become creative facilitators.

Please note: my approach is arts-based and experiential rather than clinical or academic It is based on my 27 years work within the oral and literary traditions and is guided by the approaches of artist/therapist Shaun McNiff, author of "Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination," mythologist Joseph Campbell, and Jungian analyst/storyteller Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Best wishes,

Juliet Bruce, PhD

Preferences

"PICKING UP THE PIECES OF A BROKEN HEART"

http://www.fionareilly.co.uk/articles/the-incredible-value-of-women-gathering-in-circle

At a time in my life when I had lost my moorings, I offered a writing group to homeless women fresh from the streets in a church-run shelter. Most of the women who attended this program were coping with addiction and mental illness, as well as the effects of chronic domestic violence. It was not unusual to have women sleeping on couches and the floor and coming off crack during our sessions. The women had named the group, “Home is Where the Heart Is.”

A woman named Jackee arrived one day, only to sit silently staring out the barred basement windows at the sidewalk and legs of passersby. Thick tears rolled slowly down her cheeks.

Although it was early in my healing story career, by this time, I was gathering tales that resonated and that I could authentically share with others. On this day, I told my rendering of the  Iroquois creation tale, “SkyWoman and the Creation of Earth.” 
In this tale, a young wife had been pushed off the cloud of the Sky People by her jealous husband who believed she had become pregnant from another man’s breath. Far below, the winged and water creatures gathered in a circle to save her from a terrible end in the vast sea below. She was gently laid on the shell of Great Snapping Turtle, and she awoke to find herself protected by a community of creatures who wanted only to help her. On taking a small step, she saw the turtle’s shell expand. Another step, another expansion, until walking around the turtle’s shell, she created a whole new land, an actual continent, which you may know as North America, but that the People call by its true name, Turtle Island.

"In the Story Zone, there is never an end to hope" I ended. "There are always helpers. Just be open to them." Most of the women nodded. 

“Stupid,” said a voice.

“Shut up,” said another. “It’s a metaphor, that what you call it – metaphor?”

“Yeah, it means fuck you in Greek.”

But some of the women took me up on my invitation to write whatever came to mind.

I invited Jackee to write. “I can’t,” she said. She felt too bad about herself to do anything. A crack addict, she has lost her parental rights and her kids had been moved to foster care. She was not allowed to see them.

After a few minutes, Jackee asked for a piece of paper and pen. She wrote and then ripped the paper into pieces. “What a piece of shit!” she cried.

“If it’s how you feel, it’s good,” said one of the other women, looking up from her page. “Just keep writing.”

Meanwhile, I kneeled down and gently gathered the torn pieces and handed them to Jackee to hold. 

At the end of the writing period, when everyone had read their work, they gave me their poems to type up for our newsletter. Jackee held on to her fragments. But the group cajoled her into letting someone read all the crumpled pieces. Piece by piece, Jackee read:

Round and round I go

Lost in a maze

Trying to find my way out

Crying and crying

I want to stop

No more tears in my heart

Window, look out

See my life

Go by so fast

Time goes by so fast

Give myself time to heal

One day at a time.

            “If I were going to give it a name,” I said, “I’d call it ‘Picking Up the Pieces of a Broken Heart.’” I said I heard a shift from the despair of the first line to the medicine of the last.

            “Yeah, maybe,” she said.

            The following week, Jackee appeared on time and sat quietly off to the side, carefully writing and rewriting on a legal pad. Halfway through, she asked if she could read something.

            It was a short poem thanking everyone for their support and read another poem:

            When night falls

            I look at stars.

            I feel hope

            Facing a new day.

            Every day I try to say a kind word

            To someone.

            “Hold on. Don’t give up on yourself.

            Remember, one day at a time

            God loves us all.”

            The group burst into applause

“That’s beautiful, Jackee.”

“Write one for me,” said another.

Thus began Jackee’s new life as the poetry lady who created birthday cards for the other women to give to their family members.

Little things revealed her changing sense of herself. For example, she still sat in the same chair but she moved it into the center of the circle. She began to wear lipstick and to carry a small mirror, which she consulted frequently. This role became the foundation for a new life. Jackee had wanted to be a child minder, but her history made that impossible. Under the monitoring of the homeless center, she was able to fill this role.

Jackee has her good weeks and her bad weeks. For addicts like her, staying off crack is like trying to climb bare-handed out of an icy pit. What it ultimately comes down to is a persona’s ability to make healthy choices. Only Jackee has the power to change her life.

But the poems and stories are footholds. They bear witness to her struggle and her progress. “You got this far,” they say. “Keep climbing.”

It was becoming clear to me that my true ground lay within this healing story process. Whatever was meant to happen with my marriage, however I was supposed to make a tolerable living as a writer, it would come through this work. I didn’t know where I was going. But I knew it would be through this process. I had come to center. I at least had found something I could do with my whole heart.

HOW WE CAN BEGIN TO HEAL OUR BROKEN WORLD: FOR CHANGE-MAKERS

For more than 26 years, I’ve been helping individuals and communities creatively navigate difficult transitions -- such as loss of a loved one, livelihood, illness, or bursting forth of a life unlived, the collective trauma of community disaster -- through story-making. I’m now finishing a book -- a combination memoir and workbook -- about my healing story approach.

Not since 9/11, have I felt such urgency to put my work in service to healing our national culture. For the next year and half, I’m going to be offering more community reconciliation programs to counter-attack the hate and violence-filled narratives that the Administration and its minions are flooding media with. I’m targeting my programs now to change-makers: healers, writers, storytellers, teachers, activists.

Here's the mistake many are making: Focusing on Trump. This only gives energy to his evil and distracts from the fact that millions of citizens support him as a cult – meaning a disregard for facts in favor of allegiance to a leader that makes false promises, but is interested only in expanding his own power and wealth. But how can we pull followers out of this cult? Not by judging, preaching, haranguing.

Rather by listening, engaging, finding non-political common ground, by sharing our stories – not our victim tales, but a deeper story that is always flowing like a river beneath the surface of our lives – where we are one people, one race, one blood.

On Sept. 10, at 8 pm eastern, I’m going to be offering a free introduction to a 3-step healing story process for people who would like to use story in their community, therapeutic, or classroom programs, but may not know how. That’s Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 8 pm eastern time.

To register and receive the link, write to me at juIietbrucephd@gmail.com.

GETTING TO ITHACA: HOW TO TELL A NEW WORLD INTO BEING, ONE STORY AT A TIME

Grandfather Stone, Seneca Creation Tale

Some years ago the conflicts in our nation and world had flamed into war at every level. I see now they were but a foretaste of the calamities taking place in our country at this writing. Then, in the last weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, I facilitated a workshop for trauma counselors who had come to Washington, D.C., from all parts of the country for a national conference. In the news that day was a fraudulent attack on one of the candidates that doomed any chance he might have to win, The nine participants in this workshop reflected the cultures and biases of their separate regions. They entered as hostile strangers, speaking emotionally incompatible languages, isolated within their own political ideologies, fears and prejudices.  

            One participant, a young man from New York, had come early to sit quietly by the sunny window and gaze out at the Washington Monument rising like a lonely mast from the Federal Mall across the street. The sun was dazzling and warmed the corner of the large conference room where I had set up a small circle of chairs. He confided to me that he was overwhelmed with the two traumatic realities affecting his clients (and himself): AIDS and 9/11. He had hoped to find some comfort by coming to the conference, but so far he had felt only increased isolation. He did not have much hope for this session, he said, but since the blurb had mentioned the healing power of story, and it was the last day, he had figured, what the hell.

            The tension was palpable as, one by one, participants introduced themselves, their faces registering distrust, even distaste, as faith-based counselor from the South met gay psychotherapist from New York.

             I introduced myself and gave an overview of healing story plot—crisis; the struggle to resolve it; and the transformation both in circumstances and the heart of the protagonist. The boredom of my listeners was obvious as they rifled through the handouts I had so lovingly prepared.

            Bored, that is, until I uttered the password to the realm of magic: 

        

“Once upon a time...” Doorway to the Path of Creation

            I launched into a brief retelling of a verse toward the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is found naked and shipwrecked on a lonely beach at the end of an island belonging to an ancient seafaring people.

“Once upon a time there was a great warrior named Odysseus,” I began.

As it always did, this epic tale of a lost soul transfixed all of us.

I told them how after a 10-year war, the Greeks declared victory and set out for home. But Odysseus had steered his ship of returning warriors into alien waters and became lost. For 10 more years, they wandered. It wasn’t until he found himself shipwrecked on an island beach and told his story to his rescuers that his fortune changed and a new story began to take shape. So moved was the island king by the sufferings of this brave man that he ordered his sailors to place him on a ship and return him safely home to his kingdom of Ithaca. 

The Odyssey is a timeless tale and is applicable to all our lives, even today, I said to the trauma therapists. Especially to our lives today, when so many of us feel adrift and traumatized, yearning for our own Ithaca.

            The trauma therapists listened quietly as the narrative unfolded.

At the end, I asked my usual question: “What stands out for you?” There were a few questions about how this related to helping kids who had been sexually abused and how to separate one trauma from another in a person's life. I explained that story was not a clinical process aimed at treating symptoms. Rather, it regenerated the healing life force that no medically based treatment modality could reach. But the elephant in this room was the toxic distrust that permeated the group and the country.

Finally, the woman from the southern church murmured that she resonated with Odysseus’ long wanderings because she had lost her own daughter to cancer nine years before. Although she was a woman of faith who had attended many grief workshops and healing retreats, and even though she helped many others deal with their sorrows, she herself had remained frozen in the day her daughter died.

In 25 years of facilitating healing story workshops among every possible population, including groups that were in extreme conflict, I have seen what happens when I tell a mythic tale and people respond with their own stories, stepping out of their small, anguished realities into a larger one. I have found that most people are yearning to tell their stories, but they don’t know how. The old tales help to release their words and bind them together in a common story. I have learned how to identify the exact moment when this bonding happens: There is a palpable shift and softening in energy, a deepening quiet, a profound stillness: “I” becomes “We.” It happened here. The group became deeply quiet and attentive.

In the stillness, the man from New York spoke: He described the devastation that surrounded his life as a healer, gay man and New Yorker still struggling many years later to come to grips with the World Trade Center attacks. A few others joined in, sharing their own feelings of exhaustion from vicarious trauma, the caregiver’s occupational hazard.

After a brief writing period, I invited them to share what they had written with the group. The woman read about the moment of her daughter’s death. As she did so, she raised her eyebrows at the words: “A peace came over Lila's face, and I knew at that moment she was in the arms of a love greater than even I her mother could give her.”

“I had forgotten that moment,” she wept softly.

The young man read his piece describing his desolation without a future, surrounded by trauma, yet finding moments of peace in sunlight, water and the trees in Central Park. Held in the embrace of community, their myth-inspired writing released the healing insights so needed by their souls. The tensions in the group dissolved, as several others haltingly read their own writings.

I have no doubt that we are brought together to release life force in the world through the healing images and words we have within. From the Odyssey to grieving woman to frightened man to group, story generated a moment of wholeness and peace.

After a long, releasing cry, the woman said that something had broken and that now she could finally move forward.

No words from me were necessary; I let the silence surround them, each finding what they needed there.

After a while, I brought the group to a less vulnerable state in preparation for the rest of the day. “What do you take from this?” I asked. One by one, almost every person shared how much more relaxed they were, less stressed and feeling that they had truly connected with other people at a level they rarely got to experience, even in their families. Something real had happened. Nothing had actually changed; yet everything had. A larger story, beyond their personal lives, was being woven; life flowed again.

Trauma or loss may have tossed you out of the web of your life. Finding and sharing your deep story is the way back in.

loveyourstorypodcast.com

You enter a larger field of human energy where you can find nourishment, light, restoration and resilience based not on hope but on the community engendered by the merging of our stories into one story: the longing to feel at home in the world and within ourselves. An image, character or situation in a story — be it contemporary, fairy tale or myth — makes a connection with someone that has never been made before or opens a blockage at a level of a listener's psyche that is inaccessible to their rational mind and ordinary language. Previously unimaginable transformations in mood, behavior and life flow from this opening that emerges between you and your listeners. Story reaches beneath the thinking, judging mind to the feeling one, where we are all human beings together standing on the common ground called life.

            Whether in a prison, a homeless shelter, a hospital cancer unit or a first responder treatment center — crowded environments filled with trauma, stress, fear, depression and isolation — we the people relax. Our voices become stronger; strangers bond intimately; we laugh together; life force flows and profound healing occurs. 

             This knowledge is my rock. Story helps me remain stable and focused in my own life’s rocky places. It will help you, too.

           It's true that storytellers create the world. We spin a world with our words and metaphors, plots and yearnings that ultimately manifest in physical reality. When one world story is created or dies, we spin a new one. It gives me some small comfort in this dark time when so much that we hold precious is being destroyed and reminds me that we must carry on, telling stories and bearing witness to life’s hard beauty as well as its continuation.

All rights reserved. Jun 3, 2019  Juliet Bruce, PhD. Excerpt from "A Write of Passage," and from a chapter published in the journal of the National Storytelling Network, January 2019.

A PLOT FOR OUR TIME

The 2012 film, “The Attack,” directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri, haunts me still. In fact, it feels entirely relevant in our present explosive times. “The Attack” is an archteypal quest tale in a contemporary setting, and it concerns the painful modern issues with which we are so familiar. The object of this quest is an answer to the questions we routinely ask in the face of terrible acts: Who was this person, how could they do this? And the equally dreaded questions: Am I complicit? What can I do?

The film’s protagonist, Amin, is a highly successful and assimilated Arab surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, well-loved by his Jewish colleagues. Amin’s 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 wears 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. This plot may be re-enacted in our own lives when everything we had assumed to be true is shattered and we must find a new ground in which to locate ourselves.

Ever deeper and higher Amin 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 ascends the steps of a church where he confronts the radical Christian 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 cold refusal to explain or engage in any way with the grief-stricken doctor speaks of a violence deeper even than actions and words—the violence of complete disconnection, sociopathy and contempt for the humanity of another—a violence that is all too familiar in our own daily headlines.

“The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is locked away from the resources necessary for life, left powerless, voiceless and in thrall to an evil, 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 family part of the monstrous plot, but that its Tel Aviv terror cell used his very own apartment for planning sessions during the day while he was performing life-saving surgeries. At the end of this heart-wrenching journey to the Arab village of his childhood, his nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.

Watching it, Amin 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 an ordinary 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 and authentic healing in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity of reality, the both/and over the either/or lens on life, and it holds a through-line to a transformed life.

Later, after seeing this movie, I sat with a friend at a café across the street from Lincoln Center, New York’s famed cultural complex in a neighborhood much like the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film. We pondered the questions the film does not answer: How could Amin not have sensed that his wife was leading a secret life? Was he therefore complicit? These are the questions we all ask when confronted with a terrible truth about a partner, a child, a job, our country. My friend and I ended our conversation hours later with our personal memories of betrayal and debating our own complicity through blindness in our country’s decline.

As I walked from the subway to my apartment several long blocks away and up a narrow stairway to the third floor, I thought about my own life in relation to Amin’s, and in particular my journey decades before to the heart of America's darkness in a maximum security unit housing lethal human beings. My intentions were good. My life as an adult had been dedicated to peace and to justice; in my work I created safe environments—I called them “story sanctuaries”—where through writing, sharing and listening, people were able to simultaneously create coherent inner lives and warm, resonant relationships with others.

Yet, when I sat down on my multi-colored couch banked with large, soft pillows and three equally large and soft cats 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 resentment, anger and disgust with the U.S government for which I had spent years writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps from trying to thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated journalism industry. Perhaps it was rooted in the ghosts of the nursery, 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, yet remained suppressed by my “nice girl, warm human being” persona. Whatever its roots, I was surprised at the level of untapped rage I had buried within myself—even with the many years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since a bout of depression in 1990. Succored by the gentle but insistent purring on my chest, my legs and at my side, like refreshing rain, I knew that giving expression to these disenfranchised feelings was important in both my life and my work. Writing within a story context enabled me to journey to the heart of darkness in myself and, unlike Amin, to emerge whole.

Writing out 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 buffering metaphor of a terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing biographically, was a journey through pain to 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 coldness 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.

My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings that often become exposed in the nakedness of grief and transition. Most of us tend to suppress the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film locked up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders, only to reap in one way or another the unhappy consequences of this denial. For example, we might have a pattern of producing the opposite of our intentions. The truth is, many of us—especially those with trauma or conflict in our histories—cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we make that hard journey to the place of shadows within.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, 2019, JULIET BRUCE, PH.D.From my book, A Write of Passage, "Fierce Practice: Facing Up to the Monsters Withut and WithIn."

Art: https://indialawyers.wordpress.com/…/law-commission-of-india

MEDITATION FOR CREATORS

The actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov described the beginning of a play or other creative project as a deep and meditative gaze upon a sense, a feeling, or an atmosphere that wants to come forth into the world. This is the creative gaze, where the smallest Intuition can become a tug that becomes a passion for expression in physical reality. Living your life with this kind of expansive curiosity transforms you from a victim of circumstance into the creator of your life.

1.Sit with an attitude of silent and gentle welcome to whatever is here in your life -- physically or narratively -- right now. The story you live or write begins in silence.

2. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly, deeply into your heart, into whatever part of your body calls for breath.See yourself expanding into the world on your inhalation and dissolving inner clouds on your exhalation. Sit for 5 or 10 minutes in beautiful silence, breathing, paying attention.

3. In this relaxed and attentive state, you are approaching the zone of clear seeing and generative being. Allow yourself to bathe in the calm waters of this life-giving consciousness. It is called by the Taoists "wu wei" -- doing by doing nothing.

4. Form an easy question: "What wants to emerge now?" without demanding an immediate answer. I promise: you will learn to trust that life will show you what it wants from you in its own perfect time.

5. Gently open your eyes, stretch your graceful limbs in all directions, give thanks for the gorgeous opportunity that is your life, for possibility -- whatever presents itself now -- and for the greatest gift of all: compassion for yourself and all living things.

6. Put pen to paper to sketch or write. Jot the note of a melody that wants to be heard. Move a hand or foot. This is the metaphorical language of the path that wants to be seen. Improvisation is the path of truth.

Know that you can always find your true path out of the dark forest or the endless sky by being still and letting the world show you the way.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, JULIET BRUCE, PHD, 2019. From "A Write of Passage: a Storied Path for Yearning Souls," working title for my almost finished book.

LAID BARE

In going through old blog posts in search of something else, I found this one from 2012, which seems entirely relevant to our present traumatic times. I hope it offers some encouragement for using story as a scaffold to hope and new beginnings when things look dark.

New York City, 10.29.12

Of all the devastating images of wrecked, flooded, and burned out lives from Hurricane Sandy that hit the East Coat last week, this one of a building with its front wall ripped off has been the most awful to me. What happened to the people who lived here? Were they in these rooms when the walls fell away? Where are they now? 

I was one of the lucky ones who never even lost power, much less my home. Even so, I've been feeling a deep sense of vulnerability -- sadness for the suffering of my neighbors, and a deep anxiety about the hard truth: We work so hard to create homes for ourselves; we do all the right things. And in a moment – be it a historic storm, a diagnosis, or a betrayal revealed -- Home is stripped away. We are face to face with the raw truth of life that everything we hold onto for dear life is impermanent and will leave us. There’s no going back to Monday afternoon before the storm.


Finding the real certainties when the false ones are ripped awa

The First Certainty: Your breath. Become aware of your breathing – in and out. The breath, the beating heart, is the Beginning.

The Second Certainty: Your body. Become aware of your body. Are you in pain? Where? Are you afraid or sad? Where do you feel it – in your stomach, shoulders, back, neck, or head? Breathe through these sensations.

The Third Certainty: External crisis may trigger an internal one. Become aware of the inner stories that are triggered by the outer circumstances. Usually they are stories of fear or despair. “This is the end,” The Doors sang in the '60s, when everything familiar was falling apart. Compassionately allow these dark stories to exist. In fact, give them expression: draw them, write, drum, or dance them.

The Fourth Certainty: Self-expression is the channel that allows life to flow again.Follow the words and shapes that appear on the page or in your imagination, the rhythms and movements as they change. They will. It never fails. 

The Fifth Certainty: Joining with others is the beginning of community, and community is the grid for a new world. Share your story and listen to theirs.

The Sixth Certainty: Forming a vision gives power. Find a pole star, a dream, a beacon, something to aim for, both individually and collectively. Give whatever you can to help each other realize this vision. 

Whatever form it takes, the aftermath of disruption or disaster can be for many people a kind of falling out of the flow of human life. After the immediate shock, we can be paralyzed by feelings of helplessness, loss of meaningful language, the ability to connect with other people, and hope in the future. It can feel like this terrible experience is the whole story – or worse, the end of the story. And it is, in a way, the end of the life we have been living. In some ways, the aftermath of disaster can be a spiritual death. 

But what have I learned in all these years of living and working with story? That beneath the fear and grief is the ground of something new. If we can sit with fear, breathe through it, allow it to dissolve like the frail walls we build to protect and separate ourselves from one another and from the unknown, we can find safety in the awareness that we are still here. We are alive. Amazingly, a deep, quiet, inward joy emerges. Life flows again. Ultimately we learn that the only safety is to live in the question, What wants to emerge now? 

In my own life and in all my years of helping others, I always go back to story. Why? Because it is in fact a scaffold for transforming disaster into a field of growth. In story, misfortune -- the inciting event -- propels a character out of their ordinary world into a quest for healing, greater well-being, understanding, whatever it is they need. Along the way, they change, becoming wiser, better, or more courageous; they find dimensions in themselves they never knew they had. In a really good story, they become a hero to themselves and to others. Theychange the story. 

Human beings used to live with and respect nature. They learned from the patterns of dying and rebirth inherent in seasons how to let go and die and how to resurrect life. They listened to birds and learned to sing a new world into being. This truth is the foundation for every ancient people’s creation stories. And it can be our truth in these times of change.

There’s a native American tale called “Incanchu’s Drum,” about a great volcanic eruption that destroys the whole world. The only survivors are two birds flying over the land that is covered in ash, unable to find their home. Circling and circling, they become exhausted and are on the verge of giving up… until Creator appears and says, “Fly until your middle feathers point down, and follow them. There is your home.” 

Landing in a field of ash, the birds are in despair; there is no water, no food, no trees. The only thing left is a big block of charred ruin. One of the birds, called Ichanchu, leans against it and falls asleep. When he awakens, not knowing what else to do, he begins to beat it like a drum. 

Eventually a song emerges from the primal rhythm, and after a time of singing, a small sapling begins to appear from the ashes. This is the tree of healing and life. From this tree arise other trees, and soon a forest. The animals come back, followed by the people. Life is reborn. The only sign of the world’s destruction is a thin layer of ash on everything.

This is why I keep going back to the old stories. They give us images of rebirth to hold on to in times of death, and they provide roadmaps for creating something meaningful from disaster.

My imagination, optimism, and deep faith are what I have to give you. Slowly, we can build a new world together -- without walls.

   

FIERCE PRACTICE: GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO HATE -- ON THE PAGE!

A PLOT FOR OUR TIME

LadyGilraen.Wordpress.com

The 2012 film, “The Attack,” directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri, haunts me still. In fact, it feels entirely relevant in our present explosive times. “The Attack” is a tragic quest tale in a contemporary setting, and it concerns the painful modern issues with which we are so familiar. The object of this quest is an answer to the questions we routinely ask in the face of terrible acts: Who was this person, how could they do this? And the equally dreaded 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. Amin’s 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 wears 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. This quest is archetypal and it may be re-enacted in our own lives when everything we had assumed to be true is shattered and we must find a new ground in which to locate ourselves.

            Ever deeper and higher Amin 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 ascends the steps of a church where he confronts the radical Christian 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 cold refusal to explain or engage in any way with the grief-stricken doctor speaks of a violence deeper even than actions and words—the violence of complete disconnection, sociopathy and contempt for the humanity of another—a violence that is all too familiar in our own daily headlines.

            “The Attack” is not a political film. It is an impassioned but even-handed exploration of what happens when a population is locked away from the resources necessary for life, left powerless, voiceless and in thrall to an evil, 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 family part of the monstrous plot, but that its Tel Aviv terror cell used his very own apartment for planning sessions during the day while he was performing life-saving surgeries. At the end of this heart-wrenching journey to the Arab village of his childhood, his nephew hands him a video of his wife’s last moments.

            Watching it, Amin 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 an ordinary 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 and authentic healing in chaotic times: it holds the ambiguity of reality, the both/and over the either/or lens on life, and it holds a through-line to a transformed life.

Later, after seeing this movie, I sat with a friend at a café across the street from Lincoln Center, New York’s famed cultural complex in a neighborhood much like the bombed-out Tel Aviv streets in the film. We pondered the questions the film does not answer: How could Amin not have sensed that his wife was leading a secret life? Was he therefore complicit? These are the questions we all ask when confronted with a terrible truth about a partner, a child, a job, our country. My friend and I ended our conversation hours later with our personal memories of betrayal and debating our own complicity in our country’s warmongering[CF2] .

As I walked from the subway to my apartment several long blocks away and up a narrow stairway to the third floor, I thought about my own life in relation to Amin’s, and in particular my journey to the heart of darkness in a maximum security unit housing lethal human beings. My intentions were good. My life as an adult had been dedicated to peace and to justice; in my work I created safe environments—I called them “story sanctuaries”—where through writing, sharing and listening, people were able to simultaneously create coherent inner lives and warm, resonant relationships with others. 

            Yet, when I sat down on my multi-colored couch banked with large, soft pillows and three equally large and soft cats 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 resentment, anger and disgust with the U.S government for which I had spent years writing propaganda to pay my bills, or perhaps from trying to thrive as a member of the #MeToo generation and a woman in a male-dominated journalism industry. Perhaps it was rooted in the ghosts of the nursery, 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, yet remained suppressed by my “nice girl, warm human being” persona. Whatever its roots, I was surprised at the level of untapped rage I had buried within myself—even with the many years of healing work, especially forgiveness, I had done on myself since my depression in 1990. Succored by the gentle but insistent purring on my chest, my legs and at my side, like refreshing rain, I knew that giving expression to these disenfranchised feelings was important in both my life and my work. Writing within a story context enabled me to journey to the heart of darkness in myself and, unlike Amin, to emerge whole.

crosswalk.com

            Writing out 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 buffering metaphor of a terrorist, which I was unable to feel when writing biographically, was a journey through pain to 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 coldness 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.

            My point in sharing this experience with you is to assure you that you are not alone in harboring unacceptable feelings that often become exposed in the nakedness of grief and transition. Most of us tend to suppress the unwanted figures in our psyche, much like the oppressor country in the film locked up the displaced people in refugee camps outside its declared borders, only to reap in one way or another the unhappy consequences of this denial. For example, we might have a pattern of producing the opposite of our intentions. The truth is, many of us—especially those with trauma or conflict in our histories—cannot move forward wholeheartedly toward a happier future until we make that hard journey to the place of shadows within.

WHAT IS FIERCE PRACTICE?

            I first heard the phrase “fierce practice” from meditation teacher George Pitagorsky at the New York Insight Meditation Center around the time I saw “The Attack.”[1] George defined fierce practice in the Buddhist tradition as the courage to stay on the meditation cushion no matter what arises, echoing mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn’s guide to “full catastrophe living.” [In life, fierce practice means to face facts, carry on, make a leap of faith, admit defeat, surrender, do things we have never done before done, go places we have never been. Fierce practice is to maintain our unconditional commitment to life, to truth, to a new vision and to persist to the end.

This is what change demands of us. As you may be experiencing now, as I have, life after traumatic experience, loss or in the undefined territory of transition, is a jumble of non-coherent events, fears, hopes, broken dreams, haunting memories, fragments of old stories and pieces of a fragile new reality appearing like faint glimmers of starlight in a dark night. We are asked to pick up the pieces and make a new life while we are feeling most vulnerable and alone.

            Writing is my fierce practice, especially writing within a story context, in the voice of characters who live and struggle there—and more specifically, within the story plot of Quest, referred to as “the hero’s journey” by Campbell, and later simplified for writers by Christopher Vogler in A Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters.[2]  

The power of this story paradigm lies in the protagonist’s yearning for wholeness in the deep stories of humanity that we all share and their struggle to win it against all odds. This ancient story plot has been my foundation, my through-line and my place of calm abiding through the many ups and downs in my life. It has given larger context to my own challenges and helped me, like Amin in The Attack, journey to the heart of darkness in my own life. Unlike that of Amin, my journey leads to wholeness. It is a story path that you can follow too.

What is a situation that deeply bothers you?

Whom do you hold responsible?

Who is or could be the hero who changes the story here?

Improvise a dialogue between these two characters.

What emerges for you?

2019, All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, PhD -- from my book

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[1] https://www.nyimc.org/teachers/george-pitagorsky/

[2] Christopher Vogler, A Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters. (Los Angeles: Michael Weise Productions, 1992).

[3] Isabel Allende, Paula: A Memoir. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995).

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