Insight Trails

Q&A: John Argue, Teaching Movement with Grace to Parkinson's Patients

By Jon Berry

BALANCING, SKIPPING, TUMBLING, DANCING: “People with Parkinson’s Can’t Do That, Can They?” is not just the title of a video celebrating the graceful achievements of the Parkinson’s Disease patients who are students of John Argue. It is also a phrase that comes easily to mind watching the film (to view, click here or go to end of article).

    For the past 25 years, John Argue has been teaching people with Parkinson’s how to move mindfully and consciously. Drawing on the skills he had developed to train actors – ranging from traditional theater arts to Tai Chi and yoga – he helps Parkinson’s patients mitigate the stiffness, tremors, and impaired balance that are characteristics of the disease.

    His pioneering methods, developed in his studio in the San Francisco Bay Area, have spread across the country, through books, videos, and teacher training.

    I talked with John about his work and the remarkable path his life has taken, from his upbringing in Catholic orphanages in the Southwest – where his desire to teach first took form – to the spiritual approach he calls “jackhammer Zen.” 

QUESTION: To start, could you give me a brief CV?

JOHN ARGUE: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1936. When I was very young, just turning 7, my family disintegrated because of my father’s alcoholism. I was sent to St. Patrick’s Indian Mission in Anadarko, Oklahoma. I attended through eighth grade; my two sisters and I were among a small handful of non-Indian, non-Mexican kids there.  I graduated high school from John Brown Military Academy of the Ozarks, in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, a Christian military academy for "wayward youth." In 1954 I joined the Navy. I mustered out in 1957, and used the GI bill to go to college in California.

    I took a BA in English and an MA in drama at the University of California, Berkeley. I worked for a while in professional theater, then set up my own small theater company and acting school in Berkeley in about 1970. I did that for about 10 years. Sometime in the middle of that period I started doing drama therapy with children and with hospitalized adults.

    In the 1980s a friend of mine with Parkinson’s asked me to help her by teaching her to “move consciously.” So I took her on. We were so successful her doctor began sending other people to me. Over time, my career shifted over completely to working with Parkinson’s people. I’ve now been doing this for 25 years. 

Q: Tell me about your work with Parkinson’s patients.

A: I lead classes here in Berkeley, and travel and train movement therapists from across the country. I have two classes running now. I’m starting a third one. The Monday morning class is for beginners. I call them the Freshman Class. It runs an hour and a half and has maybe 12 people. Tuesday’s class, the Sophomores, is for people who have been with me more than a year, some for as many as 8-10 years.  Since the illness is incurable, people stay with me.

    Constant training, constant reworking, seems to be the way to keep the major symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease at bay. That is basically what the work is. Through exercise and mindfulness training, I teach people to keep themselves active and use their bodies in efficient ways, to prevent the kind of curling-up and withering that happens to people with Parkinson’s who don’t exercise.

Q: At the time that you started this work, what were the options out there for people?  

A: There were medications. And the medications were pretty good. There was a recommendation from the medical community that exercise was helpful. But nobody had devised a specific Parkinson’s exercise program. I was the first in that area. My background in yoga, Tai Chi, and teaching acting, all my skills that I had developed to teach actors, were very applicable to the problems of Parkinson’s.

    I broke it  down into three main features. One was mindfulness. People with Parkinson’s can control their movement if they keep their mind engaged with what they’re doing. If their mind wanders or if they do things automatically, their disease takes over and they become awkward.

      Second, actors because of their training learn how to be graceful in everything they do. One of the marks of Parkinson’s people is they tend to move clumsily. The automatic gracefulness they mastered as children, they lose that as a result of the disease.

    So they need to be taught again how to gracefully get up from a chair, or gracefully get out of a car, or even roll over in bed. All of those things have to be done mindfully. If you train in it, a lot of people can move, on good days, so that nobody really knows that they have Parkinson’s.

    Third is completion. One trains to complete each action before beginning the next. People with Parkinson’s Disease tend to begin the next action well before the first is complete, causing a cascade event, like the soldiers behind stepping on the heels of the ones in front, or like the crowd furthest from the door in a fire trampling over the people closer to the door. So we train in "mono-tasking" to break the common habit of multitasking. As in a zendo, we train to bow to the pillow before we sit on the pillow.

"We train in 'mono-tasking' to break the common habit of multitasking. As in a zendo, we train to bow to the pillow before we sit on the pillow."

Q: It sounds like you had a lot to learn. How did you do it? 

A: I learned primarily from the people with Parkinson’s who came to work with me. They would come in with this problem or that problem. Using my acting skills, I would give myself the problem and figure out how I would solve it. Then I would go back and teach people how to do it. 

    For instance, they were having trouble standing up from a chair. So I tried to give myself an imaginary Parkinson’s, have the same problem they were having, figure out what they were doing that was causing the difficulty, and devise a method of getting up from a chair.

Q: It’s a fascinating how you describe the solution: to move to the front of the chair, then put one foot back, and, bringing your arm down to the floor, lean over to push yourself up. How did you figure that out?

A: If you observe your own self, standing up after sitting in a chair, particularly when you’re tired, you’ll notice you actually do this. You put your nose beyond your toes. You put your head beyond your feet. What that does is shift the center of balance to a point between the two feet. When you’re sitting on a chair, the point of balance is somewhere behind your feet. The rock forward shifts the physics of the center of gravity in your body to a point between your feet.

     A young person can do that with his or her feet parallel. An older person needs to move the line between the feet closer to the chair. In Parkinson’s you can’t use momentum for any movement. Everything slows down with Parkinson’s. People are moving against a lot of interior resistance. The muscle tone that inhibits movement is stronger than the muscle tone that initiates the movement. The brakes are on. It’s like moving with the brakes on all the time. If you’ve driven your car with the emergency on, you know what I mean. You have to figure out how to do all the moves in the way Tai Chi is done, in slow motion.

  Q: When I watch your videos, and read through the book, one thing that comes through is you’re having fun. Do you have that sense as well?

A: Acting is playing. You play a part. I deliberately set it out to be that way. I wanted to avoid as much as I could anything that smacked of the rigors of boot camp or anything that had to do with calisthenics or pushing. These people are too old to scold. I made it as playful as I possibly could. I feel creativity always functions better out of a spirit of play. I am training them to be actors and dancers. I want them, if they work with me long enough, to move better than most people their age, to have more grace than people who are not trained.

Q: Did you ever wonder how you would deal with your own, personal reactions to their disease?

A: Being an orphanage kid, I always felt like I was passing as a normal person in the world away from the orphanage. So acting was second nature to me. As I moved into new situations, be it the Service, or college, or moving from Oklahoma to California, I always learned how to talk like the locals as quickly as possible, and to walk like them and trim my hair like them and turn my collar up like them, and all of that. Acting is the way I go through the world. (The photo above shows John, second from right, at the orphanage.)

     I’ve always identified with the person who is the odd one out, who needs to find out how to pass, how to get by. I don’t see people with Parkinson’s primarily as their awkwardness or their illness. I tend to be able to see through to the person underneath whatever mask or disability they have.

"I’ve always identified with the person who is the odd one out, who needs to find out how to pass, how to get by."

Q: You said you worked earlier in hospitals. What did you do, and how did that happen?

A: I had a mentor who was a clinical psychologist. He gathered around him several artists. He collected us, and showed us how some of what we were doing could be used therapeutically. He invited us to attend his groups, in the day care facility, the mental institution, things like that, in Berkeley and Oakland. I worked for a while doing drama in a local hospital for acute care mental people. Then I worked with children in a residential home where they were attempting to treat seriously acting out children without a lot of drugs, with a lot of staff, 3-1 ratio, and a lot of physical contact and direct mental engagement with each kid. I was the drama teacher. I did plays with them and taught acting.

Q: You understand now that your background helps you work with people who are learning how to be in the world. Did you know this immediately or learn it over the years?

A: I’ve always tended to accept people how they are. Remember that the kids in the orphanage, we were all pretty crazy. We were all kids who had been in crazy homes. We were the cast-off kids of alcoholics and people that hadn’t made it in life. So I didn’t have that feeling of either revulsion or fascination with people with mental-health issues.

    With Parkinson’s, it’s different in a certain sense. When I started working with Parkinson’s, I was in my late 40s. I started working with people who were 20-30 years older than me. All of a sudden, I was surrounded in my classroom with people who had already completed their careers. In Berkeley a lot of Parkinson’s people are retired professors or doctors. These are folks who have made it in the world. I was useful to them. I got their approval, their interest, even their affection.

     I was getting a lot of my parenting needs met. And, with my history, I have a big parenting deficit in my life. In a sense, I found the perfect right livelihood, where I was able to be helpful to people who could help me. They would shower me with approval, just beamed me up the way parents do. I felt like I got a major contribution to my emotional and psychological health through choosing this work. Isn’t that pretty amazing? I was guided into this kind of work to heal the biggest wound of my life.

"In a sense, I found the perfect right livelihood, where I was able to be helpful to people who could help me."

Q: If someone had told you coming out of the Navy what your life would be like, what would you have said?

A: At that point, when I just got out of the Navy, I had pretty well identified what I wanted to do with my life. The grownups I knew and admired most as I was growing up were my teachers. I decided to be a teacher. At 21 or 22, I thought to myself, where are you happiest? Where do you feel best? I felt happiest in the classroom; at some point in my childhood I began to shine in the classroom. I’ve been a teacher all my life.

Q: Who was your first influential teacher?

  A: The priests at the orphanage in western Oklahoma. In particular, there was Father Girard Nathan (OSB). Basically we were kept by the nuns. But there was one priest who headed up the orphanage. It was a farm orphanage; we all did farm work. I saw Father Girard on a tractor quite a lot.

Q: What did you learn from him?

A: I’ll tell you a story. That’s probably easiest. At harvest time, when they’d harvest the corn, there would always be ears of corn that dropped to the ground throughout the field. Father Girard got all the little boys down by that field and gave us each a bushel basket, and said, you get a dime for every bushel basket of corn you glean. So we went out gleaning, filling our baskets as fast as we could and hurrying them back to get our dime. We kept this going as the sun went down. We were barely able to see anymore.

    Exhausted, we traipsed back up to the main building to find that we had missed the dinner bell. Here you had 8-10 boys, all around 10-11 years old. Since we’d missed the dinner bell, we’d missed dinner. The nun wouldn’t let us in the dining room. We went back up to Father Girard’s house, which was unheard of, 200 yards up the road, and told him about it. He by then had changed out of his farm clothes and was wearing his cassock, a long floor-length black gown, and was reading.

    Well, he headed back off down the road to the main building, with all us little boys dancing around him, walking so fast that we were all running – these long strides with his long black cassock. And we got into dinner. He just said so, no bones about it.

Q: He cared about you.

A: He cared about work. He cared about being fair. He would bend the rules when justice demanded it. And he would stand up to the nuns; we were all terrified of the nuns.  

Q: Those were all good lessons to learn.

A: Oh, yeah. I feel grateful for an awful lot that I learned there.

Q: This is probably a good segue to ask about your own sense of spirituality and how you see it reflected in your work.

A: What makes work delightful to me is I always feel better at the end of my class than when I  began it. I get something from every class. That’s proof positive to me that I’m in the right line of work. If you feel better at the end of the day then when you started, you must be doing something right.

    My work is about serving others. I find that when I forget myself and focus just on what my students need, where they’re at, what I can bring, what need I can answer, I do my best work. Something comes through me. How does that relate spiritually?  To me, spirituality implies service.

  Q: How would you describe your practice? Do you go to church? Create a spiritual space in the morning?

A: My practice is to rise early and to sit without turning on the lights. For maybe 45 minutes, I reflect on my life and let the dawn come up around me. I gradually see the world comes in as the light increases. My mind seems to work at its very best in this moment, so I’ll take a notebook and assign tasks if they float into my mind.

    My other time, which I’ve been practicing for the 10 years I’ve lived in my current home, is to take a walk for about an hour in the afternoon in a large cemetery, which serves as our local park. I’ve learned all the paths in that cemetery. I’ve learned a lot of the names, too. Sometimes I’ve gotten interested in a particular tombstone and looked up who that person was. I’ve gotten to know the gardeners. I sometimes think this is a melancholy place to get your exercise. But it suits me. Sometimes I think of the Memento Mori meditations you find in Christianity and in Buddhism, to remember death, that life is not permanent, and that what you have is the present moment. And also to live a good life, to use your life to create good in the world, to make the world a better place. That seems to be the message of my local graveyard. What people record on gravestones are their family relationships, their contributions to the world around them, a line of verse.

"...remember that life is not permanent, and that what you have is the present moment. ...live a good life, use your life to create good in the world."

Q: I’ve just been reading about how the ancients integrated death much more into life.

A: One problem of working with people with Parkinson’s, who are 20-30 years older than you, is that your students die before you do. That’s not quite usual for most teachers. Most teachers are teaching the young. I love my people. They’re with me for a good, long part of their lives. To see their courage and walk this path with them is a real privilege. But then they’re gone. Part of what I do while walking is remember them.

    In my spiritual world I didn’t connect with any religion. I did a lot of religious stuff as a child. I started high school as a priesthood student. But somewhere along the way I figured out that celibacy was not going to be part of my path. Then I got seriously antireligious. I developed a big interest in Zen in graduate school, and practiced ZaZen for 10 years or so. I wasn’t particularly good at Za-Zen. So I went into studying Tai Chi. I started thinking Tai Chi was a spiritual practice, but also it would strengthen my body, so I could sit longer. I found I could get into as meditative a state as I was moving in Tai Chi as I could sitting still.

    Eventually, I coined the term for myself of jackhammer Zen. I don’t want to retreat from the world. I want to be in the jackhammer world. I want to walk the walk where the noise and the pressure are high, and not feel that I have to go off into a closet to hear the message from a power greater than myself. I should be able to hear it at the moment of crisis. And, often, I do.

"I don’t want to retreat from the world. I want to be in the jackhammer world."

That’s I.T.

  For more on the John Argue Method, or about John’s book, Parkinson’s Disease and the Art of Moving (New Harbinger Publications, 2000), or about his exercise and movement DVDs, Parkinson’s Disease and the Art of Moving and Parkinson’s Disease and the Activities of Daily Living, please visit his website, http://www.parkinsonsexercise.com/ .

 

Practice: Running into Happiness

By Jon Berry

I'D JUST TURNED THE CORNER ONTO ELLIOT ROAD ON an 8-mile run from my Dad’s farm to the Indiana High Point Wednesday evening when that strange sensation returned. I did a quick inventory. Nothing actually wrong. No pains or strains. Just a feeling of lightness. Then it hit me. Right. I was experiencing happiness.

    Sealing the conclusion: I’d started singing along with the Springsteen song on my iPod (“I ain’t here on business, baby, I'm only here for fun…”). And my hands jet-winged out as I turned the corner, then started keeping time like a backup singer in an old Motown video.

    My mind drifted to wondering if Shakespeare had, in fact, gotten it right in the sonnets, that in midlife, with its attendant maturity, sadness, and clear-eyed realism (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red, than her lips red…”), happiness does not recede but grows more precious and real.

    How I got to this point, I don’t know. Eight months ago, hitting one of those emotional bottoms that come in middle age, I’d made a vow to get myself to a better place. We blew up the TV (OK, not exactly, more like canceled the cable service, but I’ve always loved that line from the John Prine song).

    I cleared the pantry of all the foods I reflexively reached for when I felt what the Buddhists call shenpa, that “tightening, tensing, closing-down,” poisoning, hooked sensation, in the words of the author and teacher Pema Chodron, of wanting to withdraw and “not be where we are” that can be set off by an event (“someone criticizes you”) or just unease, restlessness, or “insecurity of living in a world that is always changing.”

    I recommitted to meditating, and, moreover, to doing anything I could to keeping it fresh – including creating a guided meditation playlist of Motown songs. (Amazing, when you listen, how Psalms-like certain songs are – “As I walk this land of broken dreams, I have visions of many things…” What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?) I started reading more; started training more – running, biking, swimming; tried yoga (ha); stopped drinking; tried to reach out more to friends and family...and other things.

    But I can't honestly say whether those resolutions were cause-and-effect to my running up Elliott Road, smiling first at the miles of rolling farmland stretching to the horizon in all directions, then at the friendly black Lab who came out to greet me, then at the cow that wandered into the road, while I occasionally snatched a lyric to sing (“you were only waiting for this moment to arise”).

    Nor can I really explain the other similar feeling running a 10k in Central Park in New York the previous sunny, bloom-filled Sunday with a friend and his daughter, then joining a larger group for a walk. Or going to concerts, museums, and dinners recently. Or, back in November, running two miles of the NYC Marathon with the “running priest” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (who eventually sped ahead to make his commitment to lead a 5:30 Mass).

    Which is the problem with happiness. We can do all we can to make a place for it in our lives. We can follow the self-help advice to “choose happiness.” We can pray for it. But in the end, it’s ephemeral. It comes. And it goes. There’s good reason “happiness” is so close “happenstance.” Both share the Middle English root “hap” which means “luck.” More than “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” or “joy,” happiness means “good fortune.” We can create space for it, but not expect it. When it comes, it is a surprise. One friend says he feels “attacked” by happiness. Rather than take credit, we can only give thanks.

    I’ve recently started reading In the Valley of the Shadows, the new book by James Kugel, a Biblical scholar and Harvard professor. The subject is far from happiness. It’s a meditation, set off by the author’s treatment for cancer, on the meaning of religious belief. The book is strikingly self-aware and beautifully written, perhaps most memorably for its depiction of how the author describes, when he receives his diagnosis, “the background music” of life suddenly stops. Life grows silent. He experiences a primal feeling of being very, very small. 

    Turning to Ecclesiastes, he realizes anew that we pass through seasons of life (which, he says, translates in Ecclesiastes as “Everyone is in a season, [for] there is a time of [doing] each thing in this world” – not “for everything there is a season” of the Byrds song). But we “never quite succeed” in understanding life. There is always “something hidden.” Life, to quote the original Hebrew, is “hebel” – not so much “vanity” (“all is vanity,” as Ecclesiastes is usually translated) as a quality of being “fleeting” and “ungraspable.”

    To the list of “To-Do’s” for happiness that I’ve worked through these past eight months, I’d add one more, then: try to have faith. In her book, Faith, the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg says that in Buddhism, hard times are considered “the proximate cause of faith.” If we open our hearts and minds to take in suffering, there is healing –“not because the suffering itself is redemptive or healing” but because if we open ourselves fully in the face of suffering, we let in all life – including the capacity for healing, love, joy, and happiness. One of the meanings of saddah, the word for faith in Buddhism, she notes, is hospitality.

    I’ve been wondering if – in contast to the drawing inward of illness that Kugel describes, there’s a centrifugal force in happiness that propels us outward into connection. My friend who describes happiness as an attack says one of his first impulses, when he experiences happiness, is to tell someone. I wonder if it’s an impulse in all creatures. I’ve always loved how my dog, about 15 minutes into a walk, turns back and smiles. “Isn’t this great?” he seems to be saying to us. I wonder if the same thought goes through his mind when running toward a tennis ball we’ve just thrown, he suddenly breaks stride and, for no reason beyond the joy of it, leaps through the air. “Isn’t this great?”

    After 40 minutes of running, I reach Hoosier Hill. In truth, while it’s the highest point in Indiana, the "peak" (1,257 ft. elevation; pictured throughout) is only an ever-so-slight incline higher than the surrounding woods and farmland. I always stop to read the logbook where “summiteers” record their impressions. There’s usually some wry humor.  “Not as hard as Mt. Whitney,” note Carol and Jim from Baltimore, who have now summited 35 states' high points. “Raining. Morale low. Rations lower. But summit gained! Looking for safe descent,” quips Brooke, from Palo Alto, CA. “Failed in our first attempt to reach the summit 2 years ago. We needed help from Garmin GPS to locate,” jokes another person. “Meet me here when the levy breaks,” writes C.S.

    But then I come across a different kind of message, speaking directly to happiness, and it puts a goose-bumpy coda on the week. “Happy to be here today. Tomorrow makes 2 years clean. I am truly thankful for my life. Life ain’t so shitty.” He signs his name, and then writes “Indiana boy,” then “p.s. Thanks, God!”

That’s I.T.

I’ve lab-tested this 20-minute Motown guided meditation recently, and personally have found it happiness enhancing. Who knows, you may start the day with a dance move. Here’s the list: “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)” (Junior Walker); “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” (Jimmy Ruffin); “Mercy Mercy Me” (the marvelous Marvin Gaye); “Tracks of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson); “What’s Going On” (Gaye); and, to end with uplift (hey, this is Motown), “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (Marvin Gaye and Tammy Tyrell) and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin & Tammy). All can be previewed on YouTube.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Sharon Salzberg’s Faith, or to buy a copy, click here.

The Puma Chodron quote is from the Shambala Sun article, “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked.” To read the article, click here.

And for more on Hoosier Hill, the Indiana high point, click here, here, or here.   

Practice: A Spring-Seeking Blessing

By Jon Berry

THE GEORGE HARRISON LYRIC GOT THIS year right: Little Darling, it has been a long, cold, lonely winter. More snow. More bone-chilling days. More people I know going through pain, loss, hardship, and harrowing near-misses that there-but-for-the-grace-of-God could have been worse, than any winter I can remember.

    This morning I walked the dog up to the Aqueduct Trail to see if I could go out for a run there this afternoon. No go. It’s still a river of ice.

    But in nature there is more sun – almost two hours more a day than the first of the year. The thaw has begun. As always, it’s not fast enough for me -- nature’s version of the 12-step world’s most sweetly humbling three words, “in God’s time.”

    A day in the 60s, then snow. A spring-like downpour beats away patches of ice; I look earthward with expectation (a.k.a. a “premeditated resentment,” another great 12-step turn of phrase). Any crocuses?  No. The next day, cold blows in; the puddles are frozen again.

    It’s natural in this in-between season for a mind to drift forward, then back. After all, Nature is going back-and-forth. Maybe the trick is to follow Nature’s lead: Bring a bit more light into our interior lives each day. Force Spring into our hearts, like the forsythia and quince on the kitchen counter (thanks, Robin). Get outdoors when we can, but keep the stocking-hats and gloves handy.

    I sometimes feel a bit old to call myself a runner. My PRs are likely long gone. But there’s a new season to look forward to. A friend, Stuart, called from the city this morning to report he’d just finished a couple loops of the reservoir in Central Park, and, yeah, it was icy, but it felt good. “When are you getting out?” “Now.” “Go to it.” "Right."

     Three weeks to Spring. By the Equinox, we’ll have another hour a day of sun. Sunset at 7 p.m. Imagine. Soon I’ll be sing-songing Cummings as I slosh along the trail in mudluscious just-spring.

    Leatherman’s Loop, a 10k rite of spring at the Ward Pound  Ridge Reservation in Katonah, NY, is two months away. It’s is romp of a run, coursing through streams, hills, woods, and a mud flat that last year almost pulled my shoes off, then more hills, winding up at the “splashdown,” a water crossing that, depending on recent rainfall, can be shin-to-chest deep. You finish soaked, muddy, happy, dizzy with gratitude. What’s better than that?

    A blessing is given every year before the race. It’s a sublime moment. The thousand runners pawing at the starting line fall silent all at once, and Danny Martin, the Irish-born retired priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual counselor (he calls the race “a communion more than a competition”), gives the following prayer, a goosebumpily wonderful reminder of the grace of waking up to the world, perfect for this regrounding time of year:

Beauty before me when I run.

Beauty behind me when I run.

Beauty below me when I run.

Beauty above me when I run.

Beauty beside me when I run.

Beauty within me when I run.

I see Beauty all around.

In beauty may I walk.

In beauty may I see.

In beauty may we all be.

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, including photos, stories, and information on signing up for future years’ races (sorry, 2011 was booked up long ago), go to the race’s web site. The blessing is in the FAQ section. Click here for more. 

To see how much more sun we’re getting each day, search the Internet for “sunrise sunset.” Or click here.

I didn’t realize it until researching this piece, but “Here Comes the Sun” actually did come out of a tough winter for George Harrison. The details are on the Wikipedia entry for the song. Or just go out and buy Abbey Road. It has one of the two best sides of a rock album that I know.

Last, for the full text of ee cummings' "In-Just Spring," go to the Poetry Foundation website (click here) and search by the poem's title.

God in the Cubicle: Sacred Ground

SHOOTS OF SNAP PEAS POPPED UP from the ground this week. Nearby the first flowers have appeared on the tomatoes. Hyacinth vines that in a few months will cast showers of purple on the side of our house, stand in a row an inch or so tall. The Irises, allium, and salvia are in bloom.

    Our garden is a small space, two patches on either side of the driveway and a border along the postage-stamp back yard. But when I step into it, even if it’s  en route somewhere else – leaving for work in the morning, for example – I feel I’m entering sacred space.

At this time of year, I’m stopped by the miracle and mystery of life springing forth. Before long, with the right mix of sun and rain, it will be wonder at ripening tomatoes, basil, string beans, rosemary, and greens.

    Over the years, I’ve come to respect that different people experience the sacred in different places and ways. For some it is entering a timeworn place of worship: a spare, simple Quaker meetinghouse with worn benches, or an ancient, spacious cathedral. For others it is in nature. One friend goes to the beach; sitting there, with the ocean stretching out before her, the waves coming in, she feels closest to God. My Dad feels it looking out onto his farm in summer, the wheat, corn, and soybeans shimmering in the breeze.

Reading the Old Testament for school this spring, though, I’ve been wondering if I’ve placed too narrow a boundary on sacred space. Encounters with the sacred can happen anywhere in scripture. Jacob is visited by God in a dream one night on his journey from Beer-sheba toward Haran (Genesis 28:12). Moses is called by God speaking through a burning bush on Mount Horeb (Exodus 3:2).

In one of his lectures, the poet David Whyte says that for him the moment of “sudden insight” for Moses – what in Zen is called “kensho,” revelation into one’s true nature – comes not when God calls to Moses, telling him to “take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground.” (Ex 3:5: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”) Rather, it is when Moses looks down, Whyte says, and realizes “in the echo of the voice, not only was he standing on holy ground but had been for the whole of his days.”

My professor probably would call that “gap-filling.” The Old Testament does not say what goes through Moses’ mind. It’s a gap in the narrative. Moses’ first words – after God has gone on to reveal that He has heard the misery of the Israelites in their enslavement in Egypt, has “come down to deliver them” to a “land flowing with milk and honey,” and wants Moses to go to the Pharaoh to seek their release – are astonishment: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” 

But I think David Whyte makes a good point. Who is to say but that the ground  we’ve been walking on the whole of our days is holy? Rather than trying to confine sacred space, maybe we should think of it as expansive, reaching beyond our safe, predictable sacred spaces of church and nature to wherever we may be.  

Would it change how we are at work? How we are with others? How we approach tasks? Would we work harder? Do something else? Would it change how we are in the quotidian tasks of life, in the subway, the supermarket, bringing the kids to school, paying the bills? Would we be more present? More charitable? Stronger in our convictions? Would we see and hear more of the life unfolding around us and be more aligned with what Whyte calls “the particular conversation with the deity, with God and Creation, the ground itself,” that only we can have?  

Once, after reading a poem on Moses’ encounter, Whyte was approached by a rabbinical student who offered a further insight. In the original language, the student said, the word in God’s command to Moses to “take off” his shoes is “the word that is used for an animal shedding its skin.” In that moment when we have an encounter that takes us beyond ourselves, we go through “a falling away of old skins.”

We all need a “periodic molting” to reveal new possibilities, Whyte says. While that can happen stepping into the garden and being awakened anew to the mystery of new life, it can also happen at any time, anywhere, perhaps when we expect it least.

**

More on David Whyte is available at his website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/. A poem based on Moses’ encounter with God, “The Opening of Eyes,” is available on the website, http://www.davidwhyte.com/english_opening.html. Whyte’s comments on the encounter are from his lecture “Midlife and the Great Unknown.”

Q&A: Patricia Donovan-Duff, Director, Bereavement Center of Westchester

By Jon Berry

A GRIEVING HUSBAND LOOPS THROUGH THE CEMETERY on his daily run to visit his wife’s grave. A grandfather who had a decades-long romance with his wife finds after her death that he can love again. A child decorates a pillow commemorating his father with his dad's beloved silk neckties.

    Patricia Donovan-Duff, the founding director of the Bereavement Center of Westchester, in Tuckahoe, NY, has seen people express grief and healing in many ways. Her response is always the same: It’s all OK. There is no one way to mourn.

    Since opening in 1995, the Bereavement Center has provided a safe place for thousands of people to talk about the death of a loved one. They come for eight-week groups for children and their families at the Tree House, the center’s children’s program. They come for groups for adults mourning the loss of children, spouses, parents, or siblings, and for individual counseling. The non-profit organization also offers educational and on-site support programs for schools and communities.

    Donovan-Duff describes it as sacred work. It is done by a staff of social workers and nurses complemented by 70-plus volunteer facilitators trained by the center.   The main requirement, she says, is to be a good listener.

   A registered nurse, Donovan-Duff previously was bereavement coordinator for the Phelps Hospital Hospice Program in Sleepy Hollow, NY. She is a founding board member of the National Alliance for Grieving Children, an organization for the more than 300 grief-support programs. The Bereavement Center is a program of Lawrence Community Health Services, which also operates Jansen Hospice & Palliative Care and Lawrence Home Care.

    I talked with Donovan-Duff about the grief process – a topic that is still relatively new in our culture – and how she came to this calling.

QUESTION: When the Bereavement Center was started, there weren't many programs like it. Did you have a model?

DONOVAN-DUFF: The Dougy Center, in Portland, Oregon. It was started 25 years ago by a nurse working on a pediatric oncology unit. She noticed that kids would come in saying, “What happened to Joey? He isn’t here.” Nobody would tell them that the child had died. They were afraid the kids would be scared that they would die. But guess what? The kids were already afraid. So, the nurse’s approach was, “Let’s talk with them.”

Q: It’s remarkable that this field has grown from that one center in Portland to more than 300 today.

A: It’s a movement.

Q: What is behind it?

A: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had a great deal to do with it. In her book On Death and Dying, she wrote about the stages of dying, which she later changed to phases – coming to terms with death is not a linear process. When I started in hospice work 24 years ago, it was very hard to talk with doctors about death and dying. Today people use words like “die,” and talk about the needs of dying people, like the need to not be in pain and not be alone. Hospice opened that conversation up. The grief movement, I think, came out of the hospice movement.

    If you talk with someone who went through a death in the family as a child 25-30 years ago, they remember pictures being taken out of the room. The person’s name wasn’t spoken. It was like nothing had happened. We see remnants when our volunteers come in to take training and talk about their experiences. They’ll say nobody ever talked with them. Some weren’t allowed to go to the funeral.

    I think what we do is a very big wellness program. The message is that grief is the natural and normal reaction to a death. It’s painful. It can look like chronic depression, but it's something different. Historically the medical world has treated grief with medication or by telling people to exercise. We say, “Let’s talk. Tell us the story.”

“I think what we do is a very big wellness program. The message is that grief is the natural and normal reaction to a death... We say, 'Let’s talk. Tell us the story.'”

Q: What happens when people don’t talk about their grief?

A: I think it resurfaces when the next death happens. The psyche can do an amazing job of repressing. But the memory is still there. I think a lot of mental health issues are due to losses that weren’t attended to.

Q: What are the biggest concerns of people dealing with the death of a loved one?

A: That they’re going crazy. They don’t understand what they’re going through. Grief can be all-encompassing. People think there’s something wrong with them if, five months after a death, they can’t concentrate at their job. But it’s normal. That’s what we say all the time: Everything’s normal. There is no right way or wrong way to grieve. There’s just your way.

    Grief can be like a roller coaster. You can feel happy, then sad, then happy, then sad. When you’re going through those feelings, you don’t know they’re normal. You feel you should be getting better: better-better-better. But grief is better, not better, better…then you may hit a bottom. The other metaphor is that grief comes in waves: You turn the corner of the A&P, and burst out crying.

"Grief can be like a roller coaster. You can feel happy, then sad, then happy, then sad....You feel you should be getting better: better-better-better. But grief is better, not better, better…then you may hit a bottom."

    People in this work have come to see that there are tasks of grieving. The first task is to accept the reality of what’s happened. I was with a woman yesterday whose husband died on Saturday. She said, “I heard you do bereavement counseling. I think I’m fine, but I might need a group at some point.” She said she hadn’t cried. I asked, “Have you thought that maybe you’re in a little shock, that it hasn’t permeated your body, in every pore, that your husband has died?” And the woman, who was in 60s or 70s, looked at me and said, “Yes, I forget about it sometimes. I woke up this morning, and it took me a minute before I remembered.” The first task is to accept, “OK, it’s happened.”

    The second task is to feel the feelings – experience the pain. That’s the hardest part. It’s when you’re missing the person who’s died. It hurts physically. It hurts emotionally. We ask people to tell their story again and again and again. People need to tell the story of someone’s death more than once. The more you tell it, the more real it becomes, and the more you remember. When I had my babies, I needed to tell people the story of everything that happened over and over again. The same thing needs to happen at the end of life when someone dies.

Q: How do you help people access their feelings?

A: We talk about how you are now. What are you going through? What are your worries and concerns? In talking about what’s going on now, feelings come out. The feelings may be good, but they also may be ones you’re afraid to talk about, like guilt or regrets. Sometimes there’s ambivalence. It might not have been a great relationship.

    Everybody is different. Sometimes families don’t understand the reactions of different children. One child is crying, the other’s not. We’ll ask, what were they like before? You grieve in character. If you were a crier before, you’ll probably be a crier now.

"Sometimes families don’t understand the reactions of different children. One child is crying, the other’s not. We’ll ask, what were they like before? You grieve in character. If you were a crier before, you’ll probably be a crier now."

    The next task is to learn to remember, to commemorate the person who died, in your own way. You might put up a small shrine with pictures and candles. You might have pictures next to your bed. You might go to the cemetery. You might wear a heart necklace with with a photo of the person. Every way is OK.

    One of the beauties of groups is that they normalize. Support groups are wonderful that way. People talk to other people and realize, “I’m not the only one who hasn’t given the clothing away, and it’s been two years.” “I’m not the only one who goes to the cemetery every day.”

    In a group I ran years ago, there was a young widower with little children. Midway through the eight-week group, he felt safe enough to share how he remembered his wife. He said, “I’m a runner, and the cemetery is in my town. Every morning, I run, and I go to the cemetery, and I lie down on her grave.” There was quiet in the room. He looked around the group. He knew he was revealing something that could go either way. Were people going to say he was crazy? And the group said, “Oh, that’s so wonderful.” He had such a sense of relief.

    When somebody dies, there’s a real fear that you’re going to forget them. You’re going to forget their voice, what they look like. In the beginning, when someone has just died, you think, “Where the hell are you? Where did you go?” Even if you believe in heaven, you ask, “Where are you?” One of the goals in grieving is to bring the memory of the person inside your heart. In the beginning the memory’s too painful – you can’t bring that person inside you forever yet. But eventually, they’re just with you.

"When somebody dies, there’s a real fear that you’re going to forget them. You’re going to forget their voice, what they look like. In the beginning, when someone has just died, you think, 'Where the hell are you? Where did you go?'... One of the goals in grieving is to bring the memory of the person inside your heart."

Q: We live in a culture that goes so fast. How do you help people slow down and hear what’s going on inside them?

A: Hopefully they have a certain experience in the group or in individual counseling – a pause that happens when people feel someone is truly listening to them. People going through grief need to surround themselves with people who will listen and be with them. There are a lot of casualties after a death – friends who are not there for you, family members who don’t understand. We ask people who are grieving, “What do you need?” “I need someone to just listen and not tell me what to do or what to feel.” “OK, find that person in the next week. Who can do that for you? That’s a need you have.” “Well, maybe my friend Ann. She’s a good listener.” 

    We say this to kids, too. In our society, adults are not good at listening to sad stories, especially from kids. They don’t want to see sad kids. They want you to be better. They want you to be fixed. People are fine for a little bit, then they say, “OK, we want the old Patty back now.” We tell people to give somebody the job to be your special friend, who you can call up and say, “I just need to cry. I need to remember. Would you let me do that?”

    A lot of this is common sense. But I think in many ways, we as a society have lost our connection with our instincts. We don’t trust ourselves. We tell people, “Trust your gut that you know what you need. If you need to stay home from work one day because you just need to cry or go to the cemetery, do that. It’s OK.” It’s like taking an antibiotic. Attend to your wound. This doesn’t get better by itself. It doesn’t get better with time. It’s what you do with that time.

"We tell people, 'Trust your gut that you know what you need. If you need to stay home from work one day because you just need to cry or go to the cemetery, do that. It’s OK.'...Attend to your wound. This doesn’t get better by itself. It doesn’t get better with time. It’s what you do with that time."

    The next task is to start to reinvest in the world. The focus is less on the person who died and more on you. You learn who you are without this person who died. People are different after a profound death. It changes them. They can become better people. They can learn through that process and grow.

Q: Are there things that people have said, who have come out the other side of mourning,  that have stuck with you?

A: There was one wonderful man who came in after his wife died. They had an amazingly close, storybook relationship. He was grieving her so intensely. He really wanted to die some days. He wasn’t going to do anything with that feeling – he had grandchildren – but that’s how bad his pain was. He went to the cemetery every single day. I never would have imagined that he would have a relationship with another woman, but, today, he does. He’s never going to marry her. His wife was his one true love. In his wildest dreams, he probably never would have envisioned that he would be enjoying life again. He still misses his wife, and always will. But he’s different now.

    We’ve had people who have come back to volunteer at the center because they want to give back. I’m in the middle of a volunteer training right now. It’s amazing. The world just stops: We’re talking about death, dying and grief. There’s such silence and presence.

    Our goal is to teach volunteers how to be present. One of the nights of the training is about sharing a loss that you’ve had. We do a guided meditation, then divide into groups of two. For half an hour, the two people tell their story to each other. We then come back together and talk about what it’s like to have somebody really listen to us. Some people have never experienced anything like it. Our world today is so much about phones and computers and multitasking, we’ve forgotten how to be present for someone. The biggest gift you can give anybody is to let them know that you hear what they’re saying.

"Our goal is to teach volunteers how to be present.... The biggest gift you can give anybody is to let them know that you hear what they’re saying.

Q: What kinds of rituals do you use to help clients open up?

A: Simple rituals. At the beginning of every session, people introduce themselves saying, “Hi, my name is ___, and my mom died.” It’s a ritual of articulating the death and accepting the reality. For children, this can be really hard. They may not want to say it. They can pass. There’s also a checking-in about how the week has been.

    Our rituals are more focused at the end of the group. One of our goals in these eight-week groups is teaching them all, children through adults, how to deal with loss. Hopefully we are planting seeds that they can use in the future.

    We have a goodbye ritual the last night. In the adult group, it might be having stones on a plate. You take a stone, hold it, and say a wish for yourself and a wish for the group. The stone will be passed around, and everyone will touch it and bring it back. It’s a way of saying goodbye to each other.

    In the Tree House, with the kids, we have a ritual at the end called the Memory Pillows. We start with blank canvas pillow cases. We put pictures of the person who died on the pillow case. For the last three weeks, the kids decorate the pillow cases in their own individual way. They draw pictures. They write letters to put inside the pillow. One little boy decorated his with his dad’s neckties; the dad had a magnificent collection of silk ties. Then we put pillows in and close them up. On the last night, we put up a painting of a tree on a big drop cloth. We’ll remember each person who died. The family will come up and hang their pillow on the tree. By the end we have a huge mural. In a very visual way, the kids see that they’re not the only one going through the death of a loved one. They see they’re all different and have done this work in different ways, and it’s all right. It’s good to remember, any way you want to remember.

"In a very visual way, the kids see that they’re not the only one going through the death of a loved one. They see they’re all different and have done this work in different ways."

Q: In what ways is this spiritual work?

A: It connects human beings on such a very, very basic level. I consider that sacred work. I think that’s what this world is about, being present and connecting with people.

Q: How did you get into this field?

A: I became a nurse because I wanted to help people.

Q: When did you first feel that?

A: As a kid. I was raised Catholic. Along with the guilt – which everyone talks about – being raised Catholic made me want to be a better person. I always knew I’d be in a helping profession. I wanted to be a nurse all through high school. I liked healing, the hospitals, the white uniforms. I loved being in the middle of crisis and being with people.

   When I went to college, I majored in nursing. They were just starting nursing degrees. I discovered psychiatric nursing, and thought, “Whoa, this is great.” I loved it. I was drawn to it.

    I think I was also drawn to death. I was scared of death when I was young. There were no big deaths in my family. But my best friend died when I was six. She and I had measles at the same time. This was before the vaccine. I recovered, but she died. I have this memory of being in a dark room – when you had measles they kept you in a dark room – and emerging and asking, “Where’s Mary Elizabeth?” “Oh, she died.” I didn’t go to the church for the service.

    I’ve always been the kind of person that, when I’m afraid of something, I don’t run away from it. I go to it. I want to figure it out, so I won’t be so afraid of it. When I graduated from college, before becoming a psychiatric nurse, I worked for a year on an oncology ward of a hospital. Patients died every day, alone, in pain, in a very sterile setting. I remember going into the med room and just crying.

"I’ve always been the kind of person that, when I’m afraid of something, I don’t run away from it. I go to it. I want to figure it out..."

Q: Did you think you’d wind up where you are now?

A: No. Never. It’s been a process. Two big things that I’ve learned in the work that I’ve been doing the past 12 years – and I’m a different person because of it, I believe that – are the value of being totally present to the moment and that life is a process. Grief is a process, and life is a process.

    In a way, I feel everything has led me to this. I was a psychiatric nurse for years. One day, when I was working at St. Josephs Hospital in Yonkers, I was having a conversation with the social worker, and he said, “You know, my wife’s starting a hospice program at Phelps Hospital. Are you interested in a job there? They need a nurse.” It was pure coincidence. That year on the oncology ward was so horrible. Part of me thought I would go back to that and try to help make it better. 

    I interviewed and everything fell into place. It was the infancy of hospice. It was all very grassroots. It was wonderful. We relied on volunteers. We had a chaplain. We brought in visiting nurses. I learned how to work with volunteers. I learned how to work on an interdisciplinary team. It taught me a lot about starting a program. I took a break at one point to spend more time at home, but continued to work with the hospice. Then Phelps asked me back to start a bereavement program to support families of hospice patients.

    We networked with other bereavement programs. One day I went to a talk at Jansen Memorial Hospice, and the chaplain approached me and asked, would you like to be a director of a new program for children and adults? They saw a need to bring bereavement work not just to people with loved ones going through hospice, but to the community at large. They felt there was a lot of unattended-to grief in the community. I thought about it long and hard. I never aspired to be a director of a non-profit, with the fund-raising and administration. But I took the job. It’s been an incredible growth process to build something from nothing.

Q: Do you have things you that you do for yourself spiritually?

A: I do yoga. Not as much as I want to, but I love it. When I get up in the morning, I have a semi-meditation to try to center myself. I get my cup of coffee and sit in my living room and try to be still for five or 10 minutes.

Q: And you get spiritual experiences in your work.

A: Absolutely. Usually every day there’s a moment – we call them moments – when we’re working with people, or working with volunteers, and you make a connection. It’s a gift.

Q: Has this work changed your relationship with death?

A: In a way, I think I’ve befriended it. I don’t want to die, but I now know I don’t have to die in pain, that I don’t have to die alone, and that millions of people have been through it. We don’t know what is on the other side, but I have faith that there is something.

Q: How do you avoid burnout?

A: I try to keep a sense of balance in my life. A stable home life has helped me a lot. It helps me turn work off when I leave here. The times that are hard are when there’s not balance. Something is happening at home and my equilibrium is off.

    I have worked with incredible, amazing people with sad, sad stories. But I find that when I’m right there with them, things come into focus. It becomes clear that what a grieving person needs is someone to just sit with them and listen to them. What we do is very simple. We’re not trying to fix people. We don’t have the pressure of trying to make things better. We offer our presence. We listen and validate. We try to help people not feel so alone; there’s a healing when that happens.

"What we do is very simple. We’re not trying to fix people. We don’t have the pressure of trying to make things better. We offer our presence. We listen and validate. We try to help people not feel so alone; there’s a healing when that happens."

    I don’t think everybody can do this work, just like not everybody can be a social worker or a doctor or nurse. But those people who can do it, and do it for a long time, can have a very full life. This is work that makes you pause and appreciate what’s important. The best part is to see someone when they are so fragile and so raw, and then see them a year later and they are so different. That’s why I don’t get burned out. I see the resilience of life, that people do go on.

That’s I.T.

For more on the Bereavement Center of Westchester, including programs, information on how to make a donation to the center, and links to more information on grieving, please visit:
www.thebereavementcenter.org

For videotaped interviews with Patricia Donovan-Duff on the grief process, please see:
http://suntimes.healthology.com/caregiving/video1944.htm
and
http://www.healthline.com/hgy-transcripts/grieving-and-going-back-to-work

The Dougy Center of Portland, OR, also has a rich website with resources for learning more about the grief process:
http://www.dougy.org/

Q&A: Dr. George Russell, Healing Body and Soul

By Jon Berry, Insight Trails

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, PEOPLE HAVE BELIEVED that to discover our true selves, we need to get free of our physical selves. Dr. George Russell is part of a growing wave of healers who, drawing on forgotten ancient wisdom and modern, scientific research, argue that body and soul are intertwined and need to be addressed together. Our bodies are repositories of our experiences. If we want to shed ourselves of memories that hold us back, we need to work on the mind and also the body, “the heavy bear who goes with me,” in the poet Delmore Schwartz’s words. Otherwise, the issues in our tissues – the knot in the back from a long-ago trauma, the stiff neck from a past job – will continue to nag at us, like a bad dream.

    Like Joe Kelly, Insight Trails’ first interview (see Sept. 10 post), George Russell discovered his talent in the field he is now working early in life. But, like Kelly, he did not pursue this work until midlife. Russell graduated from Wesleyan University with a major in intellectual history and dance; earned a masters degree in movement studies from the same institution; choreographed and danced in modern dance companies in New York; and taught college-level dance courses.

    He went back to school for his chiropractic degree in his 30s, graduating summa cum laude from the University of Bridgeport in 2000.

    Russell's practice, based in an airy office off Union Square in New York City, is a hybrid, combining chiropractic, bodywork, and individual counseling, with a goal of promoting not only physical healing for back problems, arthritis, carpal tunnel, and physical ailments, but spiritual growth and a more vibrant overall life. This integrative approach and his enthusiastic, engaged style make Russell a sought-after teacher and mentor. He is an instructor at the Swedish Institute in New York City and the Kripalu yoga center in Lennox, Mass., and is a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan. He is also a guest choreographer and dance master at the De Facto Dance Company in New York City.

    I talked with Russell about how he defines spirituality in his work; his approach to his practice; making a career change in midlife; and how he draws on his varied life experiences in his work.

QUESTION: What have you learned about people’s relationships with their bodies since you started doing this work?

GEORGE RUSSELL: I think people are unaware of how much consciousness is physical and embedded in the body. There’s an archeological quality to our bodies. Events are inscribed in our musculature, our posture, and facial expressions. It’s like the rings of a tree. Our body reveals our history. A wince can tell you that a person has a stressful job. Worriers often have a line between their eyes.

"There’s an archeological quality to our bodies. Events are inscribed in our musculature, our posture, and facial expressions. It’s like the rings of a tree."

    And we experience it ourselves. Deeper truths are often accompanied by events in the body, like a gut feeling, a sigh, relaxed breathing, an expansion in the tissue, or sweating, breathing fast, or getting a feeling that something’s wrong or that someone’s not telling the truth.

    I think we know all this intuitively. We all pick up information from each others’ body language. But our culture teaches us to not pay attention to this information. The body is presumed to be this unintelligent part of ourselves. It’s not given relevance.

    Yet consciousness, intellect, spirit, are all completely present in the body.

Q: How do you see your work as spiritual?

A: I always enter therapeutic relationships with the presumption that the person is always there for a spiritual as well as a physical reason. The spiritual is being expressed through the body. There’s always some deeper energetic equivalent to the physical pain.

"I always enter therapeutic relationships with the presumption that the person is always there for a spiritual as well as a physical reason."

    What I try to do is ferret it out and bring it to expression. Partly that’s to make people aware – to focus on the physical sensation inside them. But it’s also to encourage them to engage in behaviors that will shake unhealthy patterns out of their body, so that new, healthier patterns can emerge.

    The work I do on people’s bodies can result in a person having a revelation about their body, their relationship to themselves, or their relationships to other people. It can also offer comfort at a time that it is deeply needed. All of this, I think, is spiritual work.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: I had a patient come in with Stage IV cancer. She needed a positive experience of her body. Her body, from her perspective, had betrayed her. She was in a lot of pain, and that pain was intolerable. So I put my hands lightly on her body and moved very slowly. At a certain point, I felt her take a deep sigh, and her body moved into the table. It was almost as if her body took my hand. At that moment I knew we could go into a different realm.

"I put my hands lightly on her body and moved very slowly. At a certain point, I felt her take a deep sigh, and her body moved into the table. It was almost as if her body took my hand."

Q: How do you work with patients to get them to that state?

A: Patients often come in scared or tense—sometimes, like this patient, for good reason. They lie on the table as if they are trying to hold their body off the table, like a person walking on ice, afraid it’s going to break at any minute. You can’t tell someone in that state to relax; it will just make them tenser. So I try to coach them through. Sometimes I’ll start with the patient face-down. When you are face-up, you’re conscious; your sensory organs are facing the world. When you’re face-down, you go into your own world. I’ll tell them to feel the support of the table coming up to them, or let their eyes drop into their head like Alka-Seltzer into a glass.

    When I feel them relax, I’ll say, “I don’t know what you just did, but something changed in the last 30 seconds. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. You’re doing great.” Often, patients don’t know there’s been a change. Telling them “bookmarks” the sensation, like on a computer, so they can return to it in the future.

Q: How do you know what to do?

A: One of my mentors, Irene Dowd, said that, whenever you’re touching someone, they’re touching you back. Touch is never subject-object. You never touch someone and make a change in them without them touching you and making a change in you. So the first thing, when I touch someone, is to make that contact consciously, listening to what they’re communicating to me, and taking in information on many levels: their words, the symptoms they describe, their body language and posture. Sometimes the pain is one place, but there’s an anomaly in their body posture somewhere else that needs to be addressed for the person to heal. Sometimes I just get an intuitive feeling coming from a patient.

    I had a patient who had been coming to see me every week for years. One day, when he came in and lay on the table, I saw that his hands were tense. So I started by taking his hands, very consciously, the way you would take a hand if you were going to shake hands. And then I passed my other hand over it. I’m not sure why I did it. He immediately burst into tears. For the entire half-hour he was with me, he was crying. Toward the end of the time, I said, our session will be over in a few minutes. He grieved more deeply. And then he came out of it, and he turned to me and said, “You know I wasn’t expecting that to happen.” He walked out of the office very light.

"For the entire half-hour he was with me, he was crying.... He turned to me and said, 'You know I wasn’t expecting that to happen.'"

Q: What’s that kind of experience like for you?

A: I feel totally blessed to be part of an event like that. It’s deeply fulfilling. To be able to sit with someone while they’re having a profound experience, and to have the possibility of being a catalyst for that experience through working on a muscle, or joint, or just listening, is amazing.

Q: Did you go into this work expecting this kind of experience?

A: No! When it first started to happen, I was afraid of it. I would try to stop it, back off, switch speeds, or do something that would distract the patient from that experience. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

    In time, I learned to just follow the patient. I had a client once who would writhe, and form twisting, torturous shapes in her body while I was working with her. I had no idea what was going on. But instead of trying to control it – which I really couldn’t anyway – I decided to just follow her lead, and say, “I’m right here with you,” and keep a hand on her, and be with her.

    Today I come into a session not expecting something like that to happen, but not expecting it won’t, either. I’m not as surprised by what occurs.

Q: How did you get into this work?

A: I always knew how to do bodywork. I was always aware that people have emotions while they are being worked on. I knew where to touch people, and where the next spot was that I was supposed to touch.

Q: Always being…high school?

A: More like age 4 or 5. I would touch my mother’s back, and could feel something. I became more aware of it when I was in college. We’d give each other backrubs in my dorm at the end of the day. I became aware that I was really sensitive to other people’s touch. I discovered that I could do things that other people couldn’t do. I knew where to touch people but moreover felt their brokenness, where they were sad, tense, or weak, and how it expressed itself physically. I wanted to be able to correct that or make it better. I also could sense where people felt strong, and how to amplify that.

"I always knew how to do bodywork.... I knew where to touch people but moreover felt their brokenness, where they were sad, tense, or weak."

    When I became a dancer, I would do bodywork on other dancers – dancers always have some part of their body they need work on. Eventually people started asking me to work on them. And they started giving me money. Literally, that’s how it happened. I was still a dancer. I had no formal training in bodywork. But people just started asking me to work on them and paying me for it. They would give me money, and say “I want you to have this."

    So I started putting out the word that I was willing to give people bodywork. But I realized there were areas I didn’t know, couldn’t treat, and needed to learn about. I wanted to learn the names of things. I wanted to learn anatomy and kinesiology. I wanted to learn where my boundaries should be.

Q: So what did you do?

A: It didn’t make sense for me to go to massage school. I knew how to do massage. I thought of becoming an osteopath but I didn’t want to do surgery or pharmacology. I wasn’t very interested in the traditional medical model. I believe in science, and I use it. But I wanted to operate on many levels. I was very interested in anatomy and kinesiology. But I didn’t believe that they’re the predominant mode that heals people. I really think the main thing that heals people is energetic and spiritual – what’s going on inside. You have to look at different levels of perception all the time. You can’t rely on just one.

Q: Was it hard to leave professional dance?

A: Every dancer knows they are going to have two or three careers. I had reached an end of the line. I was in an unpopular art form, modern dance, which was not lucrative. I hadn’t achieved all my goals. But I’d had a good performing career. I had performed my own work. But, as a modern dancer, I’d never really made any money. I was working a full-time job to support my career. I’d never saved any money. I didn’t really believe I could get grants. By the time I was 34 I realized that, more than nurturing my inner child, I needed to nurture my inner senior citizen.

    For a time, I thought about going into academia and becoming a professor. But my experience of teaching on a college level was that the college environment was more of a mind-centered institution. Intellectual faculties were prized over experiences of the body, and dance was implicitly denigrated because it was viewed as something “not of the mind.” It wasn’t an environment that I wanted to be in. Plus, I liked the idea of achieving something practical. In bodywork, I know at the end of the half hour that something has happened. I can tell whether a person is feeling better or not. I like that.

Q: Did you have any “oh, no!” moments when you were making your career change, times when you were convinced “I can’t do this. I don’t belong”?

A: Absolutely. If you had asked me what are the two things I would never ever do in my life I would say, “Be a scientist and run a small business.” I had to learn them how you would learn a foreign language. I had no aptitude for them. God has a sense of humor. In order to do this thing that was my dream, I had to do things that were completely counter-character-logical and counter-intuitive.

"God has a sense of humor. In order to do this thing that was my dream, I had to do things that were completely counter-character-
logical and counter-intuitive."

Q: How did you get through that?

A: I went to friends for support. They reminded me that I could do what I was doing. Still, it wasn’t easy. My original goal was to go to medical school. I needed to take organic chemistry, biology, and physics. It was really hard. But my back was to the wall.

    I needed A’s in the classes to get into medical school. And, in the end, I got B’s, not A’s. And I didn’t like it. I changed my mind and enrolled in chiropractic school. I was disappointed. But I was pragmatic. I was in my mid-30s. I didn’t have the time to take another year to retake the classes and get better grades, and then start medical school. Chiropractic school had rolling admissions, so I could go right away.

    Looking back, I’m glad it worked out the way it did. The schooling I got to become a chiropractor was much more focused on neurology, anatomy, and the physical body, which is where my interests were. I wanted to assist people’s healing with my hands, my heart, and my mind. I think chiropractic school prepared me much more for the kind of work I wanted to do than medical school would have. You go to a doctor and they don’t touch you; they send you for diagnostic imaging. It’s a very different way of gathering information and a very different model.

Q: Why does that distinction matter?

A: Let’s say you have a herniated disc in your back. A doctor will go in and do an operation to fuse the vertebrae and take the disc out. It fixes the problem. But if you don’t change how you move, you’re likely going to end up back in the same situation, with an adjacent disc herniated.

    In order to heal and stay healed, people have to change their habits. Injury is the intersection of a long-held habit with an unfortunate event. You can’t just be patched and continue the way you are going. You have to change. I don’t think people are aware how much their body is ruled by habit. Often, you have to change on very deep levels. Habits are as much defined by your psychology and spirituality – how you look at life – as by physical behaviors. All those things go together.

"In order to heal and stay healed, people have to change their habits.... Often, you have to change on very deep levels. Habits are as much defined by your psychology and spirituality – how you look at life – by as physical behaviors."

Q: How do you not absorb patients’ emotions?

A: Sometimes it’s really hard. I try to not think of their energy stopping in my body, but going through me, into the ground. But that’s not always possible. When it does happen – that I take it on – I try to write about it, or talk about it, or some other conscious process.

Q: What’s your hardest challenge now?

A: One is balancing work with rest. I’ve asked my receptionist to start writing breaks into the schedule, so I can have down time, for myself. That’s a big change. Two years ago, I would fill every day with appointments. My work is time-intensive. I have to be there physically and emotionally. And I enjoy what I do. So it’s easy to get involved to the extent that I’m answering an email from a client at 3:30 in the morning.

Q: Is where you’ve wound up where you thought you’d be?

A: Absolutely not. What I do now is not what chiropractors do, and it’s not what body workers do, and it’s not what movement specialists do. It’s a hybrid of lots of different things. It’s not something I thought I would ever get the chance to do. I didn’t know there was a field where you could do this.

"What I do now is not what chiropractors do, and it’s not what body workers do, and it’s not what movement specialists do. It’s a hybrid of lots of different things. It’s not something I thought I would ever get the chance to do."

    I think improvisational dance helped me get here. In dance, you’re moving across a room with other people in unison and suddenly you feel it’s not just you moving, it’s a whole bunch of people moving together. The event stops being a series of individual movements piled together and becomes a transcendent experience.

    I suppose that’s why I’m doing now, improvisational dance – a series of interactive movements that go on back and forth between me and the other person, hopefully resulting in a feeling of transcendence and communion, that invokes a power that’s greater than either of us and feeds us both…and then they pay me!

That's I.t.!

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You can learn more about George Russell and his practice from his website, www.georgerusselldc.com