Insight Trails

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: Ellen Baker: Being Who You Are

By Jon Berry, Insight Trails

MAHATMA GANDHI'S SECRETARY WAS ONCE ASKED HOW Gandhi could speak so profoundly, for so long, without preparation, prompting, or notes. “What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same,” the secretary replied. “You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.”

    We can’t all be Gandhi. But we can strive to be authentic – the same person in what we think, feel, say, and do.

    I was reminded of this insight when I interviewed Ellen Baker. Ellen has multiple spiritual outlets. With her husband, James Sweeney, and four other parishioners, she recently started a church. The congregation, part of a movement breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, meets every Saturday evening in their home in suburban New York.

    With James, Ellen is studying Buddhism through a three-year program at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York. She also is a lay associate of an order of Catholic nuns, and has participated in Catholic ministries. She is active in Al-Anon, the 12-step program for family and friends of alcoholics. Ellen views her work as a bookkeeper – she has had an independent practice for 17 years – as an expression of her spirituality as well.

     Her beliefs have sometimes led to confrontations. Her decision to leave the Roman Catholic Church is one example. She once was fired from a job after standing up for what she believed.

    Listening to Ellen talk, the different aspects of her life are reflections of one of the core truths she’s learned – to “to be honest and who you are.”

    I talked with Ellen about her spiritual pursuits, her work, and her journey.

QUESTION: You’re starting a church. Can you tell me about it?

ELLEN BAKER: It’s a brand-new, fledgling parish, and it’s exciting. It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded. Women can be ordained. Gays can get married. Those are two of the big issues we’ve had with the Roman Catholic Church.

     It’s part of the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA), which is a movement that started back in the 1940s with priests who left the Roman Catholic Church and started a Vatican-free Catholic Church.

     Right now we have six parishioners. The priest who started our mother church in Brooklyn comes up on Saturdays for the services.

"It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded. Women can be ordained. Gays can get married."

Q: How is it exciting?

A: It’s like we’re astronauts going to visit another planet. If you’re a Catholic, you live your life so locked into tradition. Giving it up is like giving up my citizenship. But at the same time, my heart hasn’t been fully in it.

     Both James and I were out of the church for decades. When we returned, there were always questions in the back of our minds. The Catholic Church’s sex scandal put it over the edge. It was a struggle every time we went to church. We felt like we were wearing two faces. We loved the people and loved our ministries. But when it came to the priests and the hierarchy of the church, we felt like hypocrites. We went through a lot of struggle and discernment, and finally decided we couldn’t do it anymore.

Q: How is the new church different?

A: The laity are involved in all the decisions. We decide the prayers. We take turns being the Eucharistic Minister. It’s what I think of the Catholic Church being like in the early days, when it was a new community, everybody was on equal footing, and services were held in people’s homes. It feels much more natural.

“It’s what I think of the Catholic Church being like in the early days, when it was a new community, everybody was on equal footing, and services were held in people’s homes.”

    I feel like I’m in the place where I’m supposed to be. On Christmas morning, Joe, our priest [the Rev. Joseph Diele, a priest in the Roman Catholic Church for two decades before starting the Church for All People], did a special Liturgy. He asked us where we see God working in our lives. Almost everybody touched on this new community. We didn’t know at first what it would be about. But it’s become a big impetus for all of us. It was a leap of faith. I feel I’m in a community that is all in this together, trusting its instincts and moving forward.

     Every morning during the week, we have a conference call. We get on the phone at a quarter to seven, for five to ten minutes. One person opens it with a prayer for the day. I’m absolutely amazed by what they say. They’re beautiful prayers. Then we have petitions where we pray for specific things, like people who are sick. Then we say the Lord’s Prayer and a short closing. I like it a lot.

Q: What are your relationships like in your former parish?

A: It’s been fine. A number of people feel the same way, but can’t bring themselves to move. They have been in the church all of their adult lives. They cling to the belief that the church is the people, and that it’s important to stay in there and fight. I admire that. I really do. But I’m not that kind of person. I need to get something out of this while I’m here. I’m not here to fight for what’s going to happen in 50 years.

Q: How does the Buddhist study factor in?

A: There are so many similarities between Buddhism and Christianity. Many times what we talked about on Saturday morning in the Buddhism classes turns out to be what comes up that night in the Scripture readings.

Q: Which similarities strike you most?

A: The obvious one is the message. Christ’s message is peace, compassion, and loving your neighbor. That’s basically the Buddha’s message, too – peace, compassion, loving-kindness, no killing, no violence. The life of the Buddha and the life of Jesus have a lot of similarities. Many of the stories in the sacred texts are also similar.

     I had always had a theory that Jesus was the Western Buddha. I could never buy that God would send his Son down to one small group of people and say this is just for you and nobody else. To see this happening, 500 years apart, on two sides of the world, makes a lot more sense to me.

"Christ’s message is peace, compassion, and loving your neighbor. That’s basically the Buddha’s message, too – peace, compassion, loving-kindness, no killing, no violence."

Q: And Al-Anon?

A: 12-step is the umbrella over all my spirituality. Without Al-Anon, I never would have discovered my spirituality. It’s where I learned to have a relationship with my Higher Power, and where I learned to see that Higher Power working in my life. It helped me learn to let go of outcomes and “what if’s.” My other activities are, in a sense, the natural consequence of the awakening I’ve had in Al-Anon. It made me want to connect with like-minded people, learn more, and keep growing.

Q: Going back to when you were a kid, did you always have a large spiritual component in your life?

A: Nothing. We were strict Roman Catholics. But it was all about religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey: Do the prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do whatever they tell you. I went to Catholic school all the way, right through college. Mass every Sunday. Confession. Sacraments. First Communion. Confirmation. But I never really got it. I didn’t feel anything when I was in church.

“It was all about religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey: Do the prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do whatever they tell you.”

Q: You wound up on Wall Street. How did that happen?

A: Really, by default. I started college at Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers, then transferred to Catholic University in Washington. But I dropped out at the end of my junior year. I came back to New York and got a job as a secretary.

     My first job was for the national headquarters of the Girl Scouts. I really liked it. I wanted to work in something that was intrinsically good. I was a hippie, basically. I graduated from high school in 1969. Peace, love, justice and non-violence were definitely part of my life.

     But working for a nonprofit, I wasn’t making a lot of money. Eventually money won out, and I got a job as a secretary for a big Wall Street firm. I worked five years at that firm, then got a job at another Wall Street firm. I started out working for the chairman of the board. I was at the top of the level of being a secretary.

    But the whole time I was on Wall Street, I was bored with the business. I didn’t think I could do anything but type and take shorthand. I didn’t really understand the financial world. I was never out to make a lot of money. Everybody around me was excited about what they were doing. I thought there was something wrong with me. My self-esteem was so low that I felt I couldn’t ask anybody for help. I thought they’d fire me.

Q: When you’re in that type of a hole, it’s hard to work your way out.

A: Plus I was married to an alcoholic. I just thought there was something wrong with me. My husband at the time was in the movie industry, and he got a job in Hollywood. So we picked up and relocated. I was starting to get “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as people say in Al-Anon. But I went. To some extent, I think I saw it as a chance to break free of my old life and get out of the Wall Street scene.

     We lived in California 14-15 months. I started to make my own friends. I also discovered Taoism. I started having acupuncture. My acupuncturist’s father was a Taoist master. I started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand any of it but there was something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was something I wanted.

“I started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand any of it but there was something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful... I knew it was something I wanted.”

Q: What happened to change things?

A: My husband lost his job and decided to go back to New York. His addictions were getting worse. In the back of my mind, I was starting to give up on the marriage. I came close to saying go back without me, but I felt I couldn’t give up that easily. We’d been married almost 10 years. I had to give it another shot. So I went back with him.

     The marriage continued to disintegrate. I got a job through a mutual friend working for an interior designer. He was automating his office, putting it all on computer. I could wear my jeans to work, and that really appealed to me. (It still does!) One of the areas I had to automate was the accounting department. I began to see how accounting worked. I realized I was good at it, and liked it. I like everything in neat little piles and wrapped up nicely. That’s my personality.

     I went to a work for a friend of mine who was starting a business. She asked me if I could come in a couple days a week to pay the bills and reconcile the bank statement. That morphed into a full-time job. By then, my husband and I had separated. I wound up doing all the finance and administration for her business. I started going back to school, and took accounting classes to supplement what I didn’t know.

     She had a lot of freelancers working for her – designers, writers. They really liked me. I would pay their bills the same week they would turn them in.

     I guess this is where some of the spirituality started. Most bills we put on a 30-day rotation. But I knew these people. This was their bread and butter. I wasn’t going to make them wait 30 days.

Q: What was spiritual about that?

A: You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.

“You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.”

Q: When did your spiritual shift began?

A: It really started when I went into Al-Anon. My husband and I had split up and I was having a really hard time with my mother. A couple people had suggested I go to Al-Anon. I had the classic response: “What do I need to go for? I’m not the one who’s sick.” But they continued to suggest it, so I went.

     About the same time, I started my bookkeeping business. The writers and designers I was working with started coming to me with their questions about money. They’d come into my office with a 1099 and say, can you help me out? I’d explain it, and they’d say, thank you so much for taking the time to tell me this stuff. They started telling me, “You should hang out your own shingle.” Things were getting bad in my job. I wasn’t happy there anymore. So I decided to leave. They helped me. One designed my business card. One helped me write ads to put into trade magazines. Through them, I started to get clients.

Q: Do you think there’s a connection between your starting to go to Al-Anon and starting your own company in the same period?

A: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When I went to Al-Anon, the thing that first struck me was to hear people talk about how God was working in their life. I didn’t see those things happening to me. I was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I was starting my own business. I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was listening. I began to realize that if things were going to change, it had to start with me. The first three steps in 12-step programs talk about relying on God and turning your will over. I realized I really didn’t have much choice. I had to do it.

     I started praying again. But it was totally different from when I was young. I didn’t say a Hail Mary. I basically just talked to God: “Show me what to do here. Help me out. Am I doing the right thing?” Going back to the rooms, week after week – I was going to three meetings a week, consistently, for the first five years I was in program – bit by bit, I started seeing things working in my life.

“I was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I was starting my own business. I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was listening. I began to realize that if things were going to change, it had to start with me.”

Q: Do you remember an a-ha moment?

A: I was still working three days a week at the company while starting my business. I was asked to do something I wasn’t comfortable with. I didn’t think it was ethical. I called a friend who was an accountant, and he said, don’t do it. It was Friday. I left a note on my boss’ desk, saying I can’t do this. When I came back the next week, I was fired. All of a sudden a lot of my income was gone. I never saw it coming. I had no idea. That was a real a-ha!

     I was starting to integrate what I was hearing in Al-Anon – say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t play games. Do the right thing. I did it, and, whoa, I got fired.

     I realized the power of being ethical in business. It was scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there. In Al-Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings, and to be honest and be who you are. That was the beginning of it, and felt good.

“I realized the power of being ethical in business. It was scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there. In Al Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings, and to be honest and be who you are.”

Q: People could go several ways in that situation. You could have said, “I did the right thing and it got me fired. I won’t do that again.”

A: That never occurred to me. I never questioned whether I was doing the right thing. There was one thing I learned from my mother. She never let anyone push her around. From a very early age, I would never let anyone push me around.

     There had been another, earlier incident. When I was on Wall Street, I was asked to lie to my boss by one of his underlings. There was a big political mess going on in my company at the time. I refused to do it. These corporate types just went crazy. They couldn’t believe this secretary wouldn’t do this. I was completely alienated and ostracized by the muckety-mucks.

Q: What was the difference between the two events?

A: The first time, the fact they asked me to do it just frightened me. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m in one those Michael Douglas movies about the Wall Street tycoon who’s trying to get everybody do something illegal.” I had worked in Wall Street firms at the time when they were having major scandals. I remember sitting next to a guy who was on the front page of the paper the next day being taken out in handcuffs. I had seen that kind of stuff happen, but I had never been asked to do anything.

Q: How did having a spiritual community make it different the second time?

A: I wasn’t alone. I had a community, a group of people who understood me. I could go to an Al-Anon meeting the next day and talk about it. I had people who would support me. The first time, I didn’t have that. I couldn’t go to anybody in the company and tell them. I didn’t have a 12-step group. I could tell my husband, and he was sympathetic. He said you did the right thing. But that was it.

Q: You’ve touched a number of times on doing the right thing. How do you know what the right thing to do is?

A: I ask what my gut tells me. I also ask the Christian question, what would Jesus do? It’s a cliché, but it works. And I try to think about what I’m putting out. It’s a concept I learned early on in the 12-step program: You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of karma. If I do the wrong thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.

“You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of karma. If I do the wrong thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.”

Q: Coming back to the present, what are the connections between your work and spiritual life today?

A: Almost all of my clients are doing something that’s making the world a better place. Most of them are in creative work. Their politics and values are similar to mine. Most of them are spiritual. I can bring my spirituality into the workplace very easily. I don’t have to worry like I did when I was on Wall Street that I can’t go in and speak my mind and be honest about how I feel about something.

     We talk openly and honestly. When you’re dealing with money, you have to be honest. I’ll force them to take an active role and pay attention to their books. And I always set everything up so that if I walk out at lunchtime and get hit by a bus they can go back in and figure out exactly what I was doing. There are not going to be any mysteries.

     That’s who I am. That’s bringing my spirituality into the workplace. It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a work persona and a non-work persona.

“It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a work persona and a non-work persona.”

 Q: How long after Al-Anon did other spiritual activities come in?
 
A: I began feeling I wanted to start connecting to a specifically spiritual community. I had been out of the church for 20 years. My mother came up for Christmas, and said she’d really like to go to Christmas mass. When we went in, I was just overwhelmed. They were singing Adeste Fidelis in the old Latin. I just started crying. It was such a good feeling. I wanted to experience this all the time. So I started going back. And it was great. I heard everything with different ears.

That's I.t.!

***

You can learn more about the Church for All People by visiting their new Website:
www.thechurchforallpeople.com

To learn more about the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA), click on this link:
http://www.cacina.org/

To learn more about Al-Anon, click on this link: 
http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/english.html

To learn more about the Buddhist Association of the United States, click on this link: http://www.baus.org/baus/index.html

Wikipedia is also a good resource on Al-Anon, Buddhism, and religion and spirituality generally: www.wikipedia.org
 

Q&A: Kristen Laine, Author, "American Band"

By Jon Berry, Insight Trails

SOME YEARS AGO, AT A HIGH SCHOOL REUNION in Richmond, Indiana, Kristen Laine found herself in a group of friends from her marching band days, talking about what was really going on in their lives in high school. They shared the back stories they’d kept from each other of family crises, financial hardships, and other pains. Band, they all agreed, got them through it.

 The evening stayed with Laine, eventually becoming the germ of an idea for a book: to immerse herself for a year in a high school band and uncover the stories of a new generation of teenagers. In 2004, she acted on the dream, moving with her husband and children to Elkhart, Indiana, home of the reigning state champion high school marching band, the Concord High School Marching Minutemen.

    It was a risky move. Although she had been published in magazines and had become a an essayist for Vermont Public Radio, Laine had never written a book. She didn’t have a contract with a publishing house or an agent to shop the idea.

 But the gamble paid off. The resulting book, American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland, published this fall by Gotham Books, has made waves in narrative non-fiction, one of the hot spots of the publishing industry. It has landed Laine interviews with NPR’s Talk of the Nation and other top radio programs, and has won praise from major publications as “a touching story superbly told” (Library Journal) with “novel-like richness” (The Wall Street Journal) and “a driving narrative” (The Chicago Tribune).

 The book is layered with unexpected twists. The band’s hard-driving, clean-cut band director cares as much about developing leaders as winning trophies (sample wisdom: “If you work as hard as I want you to, you’re going to have a great marriage, a great career, and a great life”). The trumpeter who is the acknowledged leader of the band sees his perfect life come undone by a series of tragedies in his family, and manages to soldier on. The classic story of the new kid in town who finds a home in the band – a story Laine, the daughter of a corporate executive, saw in herself a generation ago – concerns a Hispanic immigrant. The evangelical Christianity that suffuses much of  heartland America today plays a significant, and sometimes surprising, role in many of the stories.

 I have known Kristen Laine since high school, and for many years have been impressed by her personal journey. It has taken her through a series of leaps, from small-town Indiana to college at Harvard, then to the West Coast, where she worked at Microsoft in the go-go years of high-tech and, for several years, devoted herself to rock climbing, before coming to her current life in New England.

 I talked with her about American Band, becoming a writer, and the lessons she’s along the way, from the apprenticeship in risk-taking that she gained from rock climbing to the advice she was given by the poet Gary Snyder.

QUESTION: As much as a story of a high school band, American Band is a book about growing up and the interior struggles of finding identity and making sense of the world. Did you go into the book looking for this theme?

KRISTEN LAINE: I went into the book thinking of band as a transformative, life-changing experience, because it had been that for me. But I wasn’t sure what I would find. What I found was remarkable and wonderful. Each of the students I focused on moved closer to who they needed to become as an adult.

Q: Many adults find it excruciatingly difficult to talk to teenagers. How did you get them to open up?

A: I wanted them to feel they could be themselves with me. I remembered from when I was a teenager that teenagers have many faces. I didn’t want them to just present the face to me that they present to their teachers. I didn’t want them to be playing a role. I was sincerely interested in who they were, what they were thinking about, and why they mad the choices that they made.

 I didn’t talk down to them. I interacted with them in their own questions. I remembered that when I was a teenager, I was grappling with big questions. So when they brought up their questions, like “How does God interact in the world?” I didn’t act as if I had all the answers and that they would come to those answers down the road. I engaged them, and asked them questions: What did they think? Why were they were thinking about this? Who did they talk to about these questions? I wasn’t trying to look at teenage culture. For me teenage culture is just the surface. Underneath the surface is where the interesting stuff is.

"I remembered that when I was a teenager, I was grappling with big questions. So when they brought up their questions, like “How does God interact in the world?” I didn’t act as if I had all the answers. I engaged them, and asked them questions: What did they think?"

Q: What did you learn about kids and growing up today that you didn’t appreciate before the book?

A: Before going to Elkhart, I knew some teenagers, but not many. I think I’d accepted the media image that kids today are disengaged mall rats and very focused on what college they’re going to get into or how much money they’re going to make. Although I assumed that band kids would be a little different from that, I was surprised by how far they were from those stereotypes.

     What I found was a lot of kids who weren’t focused much on college and money at all. Instead they were focused on their relationship with God.

    That was a huge surprise. I grew up in the era of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. The Jesus Christ I thought of was countercultural and antiestablishment. In the 30 years since I’d left the state, Indiana, like a lot of the middle of the country, had become more conservative. I’d read about the change, but didn’t fully appreciate until I got there that I was going behind the lines of red state America. The culture wars were real. I’d been on one side of them, and I was now seeing the other side.

"I didn’t fully appreciate until I got there that I was going behind the lines of red state America. The culture wars were real. I’d been on one side of them, and I was now seeing the other side."

    If I was going to take on these kids’ lives in full, it meant dealing with their questions about religion and their relationship with God. They’d been brought up in a culture that had clearly defined things I saw positively as negative – that feminism was the work of the devil; that homosexuality was the work of the devil. I was truly the first person some of these kids had talked to who was a feminist, a Democrat, and a liberal. I had to try to look at them empathetically. I had to understand that they were trying to make sense of the world they’d been taught.

    Some of the students felt very clear about right and wrong. But many were trying to figure things out. Like teenagers everywhere, they had a view of the adult world that’s from underneath the adults. They saw hypocrisies between what adults say and do. They read the Bible, and listened to what their pastors said, but made their own assessments. In doing so they started to chart a path that was very different from the generation teaching them. They talked a lot about tolerance. Something they kept saying to me is, it’s not up to me to say what God decides. It’s up to me to love everybody as God would want me to love them. Not love the person/hate the sin, but simply love them.

"Something they kept saying to me is, it’s not up to me to say what God decides. It’s up to me to love everybody as God would want me to love them. Not love the person/hate the sin, but simply love them."

 From what I saw, I believe this generation of evangelicals will remain devout Christians. But I think they’re going to be different in the political realm, more politically diverse and more interested in social issues like homelessness. That was one of the encouraging pieces for me. In my worldview, thinking for yourself is key. I believe that God wants us to find our own way, and not simply do what we’re told.

Q: Many people think about taking a leap of faith to pursue a dream. You did it, going to Indiana to research the book, before you had an agent or contract. How did you do it?

A: I think my life has trained me to take risks. Partly it’s from my family – my three brothers and I were brought up to think of ourselves as special. But a lot of it was books. I was a bookish kid. I loved reading, and read a lot of myths and fairy tales. I often think I’ve gone through my life thinking of myself in mythological terms, looking at my life as a series of quests, with obstacles in my way. I’m always looking for the magical dust or the implement or sword that’s going to help me get through the obstacle to my goal. I think I did that when I came to Richmond. Through being in band, I reinvented myself from a girl who was picked on all the time to someone more poised and socially comfortable. Moving around so much when I was growing up – we moved every 2-plus years – in a sense, also helped. It taught me I could make big moves.

"I often think I’ve gone through my life thinking of myself in mythological terms, looking at my life as a series of quests, with obstacles in my way. I’m always looking for the magical dust or the implement or sword that’s going to help me get through the obstacle to my goal."

Q: How did rock-climbing come into the picture?

A: It started, ironically, with going to Harvard. I had this idea that Harvard was a place where people tried to find truth and beauty. When I got there, I saw that it was more a training ground for people to become investment bankers, lawyers, or doctors. It was the beginning of the yuppy era. I didn’t want to join the status quo. After graduation, what I wanted to do was go to Alaska. I’d just read John McPhee’s Coming into the Country.

    I couldn’t find a job in Alaska, so I got one in San Francisco. Through a friend from Harvard, I met a guy who was a climber. I thought, I’d like to try that. He got all the gear and ropes and hung them on me – they weigh a lot, about 30 pounds – and said, “Do you really want to do this?” as in “Why would you want to do this, you little girl?” That made me mad.

    I moved up to Tacoma (Washington) to do college admissions work for the University of Puget Sound. My travel area was California. Once, on a trip there, I saw this rock. I got out of my car and, in my tennis shoes, started climbing up the rock. I got almost to the top, and my leg started shaking. I got scared and grasped the rock – the wrong move, any climber will tell you – and fell to the ground, into some bushes. Luckily, I wasn’t injured.

    After I fell, I could have said, "I don’t want to do this." But instead I said, “I need lessons.” I wanted to do it, so I learned how to do it. And I liked it. I loved it, in fact. I lived out my dream to be an explorer and adventurer. For several years, in my 20s, I became a climbing bum. It was not an easy life. I lived without a car and really close to the bone. But I had really great adventures.

"After I fell, I could have said, 'I don’t want to do this.' But instead I said, 'I need lessons.' I wanted to do it, so I learned how to do it. And I liked it. I loved it, in fact."

Q: What did you like about climbing?

A: Climbing got me outside myself. It requires absolute focus, something I think I crave. I loved the feel of rocks. I loved the smells. I loved the people I got to know. I learned a lot from the other climbers I was around. They were people who were, literally, not taking the easy way. Many of them had very interesting lives. It was an apprenticeship for me in risk-taking, not only in going up a rock but in all of life.

Q: What did you learn about risk-taking?

A: Climbers I knew died. It’s one of the sad truths about climbing. Climbing magazine always has an obituaries column. So death became part of what I learned about. I learned that life is short. Even if you live to be 95, there’s not an infinite length of time. To hold back from what I most want to do is a crime.

    Over time, I learned that the climbers who were less likely to die were the ones who prepared very carefully. They were risk-takers, but they prepared themselves well. I’ve drawn on that lesson many, many times.

    Then, in the simple, physical act of climbing, I learned what it means to go for it. There are lots of climbing moves that you can’t do if you hold back.

"Over time, I learned that the climbers who were less likely to die were the ones who prepared very carefully. They were risk-takers, but they prepared themselves well. I've drawn on that lesson many, many times."

Q: Take me through one of those moves.

A: The standard climbing rule is you need three points of contact with the rock. Three points make you stable. It’s best if it’s your two feet and one hand. But there are times that you have to make a dynamic move, where you have only one point of stability, the point you’re pushing off from, to grab hold of a rock or ledge. To reach a point of safety, you have to go past a point of no safety. You have to have faith. Many of these moves also take you past a point of no return. You can’t backtrack and reverse a leap.

    When I think about the leap that we took to do the book, we had to go past a point of no return. We actually went past a couple of them.

"The standard climbing rule is you need three points of contact with the rock. But there are times where you have only one point of stability, the point you’re pushing off from. To reach a point of safety, you have to go past a point of no safety. You have to have faith."  

Q: What were the points of no return for you with the book?

A: I knew that I was unlikely to get an agent or a contract before we went to Indiana. I was too much of an unknown. The only way we were likely to pull this off was to take a risk. Once I got to that point it was an easy question. I believed in the book.

    That’s another thing I’ve learned: to trust my instincts. When I have strong leadings, they’re usually right. I had a strong sense this was going to be a good book. There hadn’t been one like it. I had the background to write it. I felt it was a reasonable risk.

Q: How were you able to take the risk of pulling up stakes and going to Indiana to research the book?

A: I owe a lot to my husband, Jim [Jim Collins, also a writer, author of The Last Best League, on the Cape Cod summer baseball league]. There was no way I could have researched and written this book without the sacrifices Jim made, moving with me to Indiana and taking care of our children, so that I could focus on the book. I spent a long time as a single woman asking the men I dated, would you ever stay home with children? It’s really hard for women in my generation to find that. And then I met Jim. He wanted to be fully engaged as a parent, and to have a real partner in his life. Jim knows the excitement of sharing an intellectual life and career, and wanted that in his marriage.

Q: How did you manage financially?

A: We had come into our marriage with money from my being in the high tech business. We used most of it for Jim’s book, and figured we would spend the rest for my book. As it turned out, we needed to spend that money by the time we came back from Indiana, before I started writing. We sold off some stock and a life insurance policy. Then we borrowed money from one of my brothers.

    We were right at the point of saying, “If I don’t get an agent by next week, we’re going to have to find other jobs,” when things shifted. That was on a Sunday. By Friday, the agent I’d wanted from the beginning, Robert Shepard, told me wanted to represent the book. That was good news: Robert wouldn’t have taken the book unless he knew there was a good chance of being able to sell it. From there, my story went beyond fairy tale. Not only did I get enough money to write the book, but I got a lot of money for a first-time author. Jim didn’t have to work, so he could totally take care of the kids while I finished the book.

Q: It’s striking to me how often coincidence comes up in the interviews I've done for Insight Trails – when people put themselves out there, things happen.

A: A number of years ago, at a writers conference in Squaw Valley, I went on a hike with the poet Gary Snyder. On the hike, I asked him, “How do I make a living at writing?” He turned around, in midstride, while bounding up these rocks – he’s truly like a mountain goat – and said, “You just do it.” It was a very simple idea. You just do it.

    It took me a long time to get rid of my anxiety about money. But once I made the leap mentally, people took me more seriously. You recognize it in someone. I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how they hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path.

"I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how they hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path."

Q: What else have you learned about risk-taking?

A: That you have to be fully invested. For a while in my early 30s, I got so used to taking risks that I would just leap. The last job I had at Microsoft was entirely the wrong leap. I took it because I thought it was going to look good. I forgot to ask myself if I really wanted it. It turned out that I didn’t. I got fired. I failed. Moving up the corporate ladder turned out not to be meaningful enough to me for me to take that big a risk. I didn’t want it badly enough to do all it required.

 In contrast, writing this book was something I’d wanted my whole life. I was so determined to do it. It was the first time in work that I’ve ever had the feeling that I’d had climbing, of absolute investment.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

A: I first said I wanted to be a writer when I was five years old. I had other dreams as well. When I was seven, I wanted to be a missionary. I wanted to go to China, and I thought being a missionary was how you got to China. I was reading a lot of 19^th-Century books at the time! I also wanted to be an explorer. I remember reading about Marco Polo and being unhappy that there were no more continents to be discover – then reading Kon-Tiki [Thor Heyerdahl’s book about crossing the Pacific by raft] and thinking, there are other ways to be an explorer. When I think about the passions I’ve had in my life – words and books, having adventures, and trying to make the world a better place – nothing has changed! (Laughs)

"For many years, I think I was waiting to be anointed, like the girl at the soda fountain who gets tapped to be a movie star. I had this idea that writers were picked. Now I realize that writing is not a divine gift. It's a craft. If you want to do it, you get an apprenticeship."

Q: How close is where you’ve wound up to where you thought, back in your 20s, that you’d be at this stage of life?

A: When I was younger, I think I had a failure of imagination about what it meant to be a writer. I had an ideal, and that ideal got in my way. For a number of years, I think, I fell into avoidance strategies. It was exciting to be at Microsoft, but I knew every day that it wasn’t really where I wanted to be.

 When I was turning 40 one of my brothers said to me, “If you’re 40 and you’re not writing, maybe you weren’t meant to do it.” Inside I just screamed, “NO!” Because I didn’t want to believe it. But after I got done screaming, I asked myself, what am I still missing? And I tried to find people who could help me get the skills I lacked so I could get to where I am today.

     For many years, I think I was waiting to be anointed, like the girl at the soda fountain who gets tapped to be a movie star. I had this idea that writers were picked. Now I realize that writing is not a divine gift. It's a craft. If you want to do it, you get an apprenticeship. You go get the skills you need and practice them.

That’s I.t.!

****

To learn more about American Band of buy a copy of the book, please go to:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Band-Dreams-Coming-Heartland/dp/1592403190/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195574777&sr=8-1

To learn more about the book, read a sample chapter, listen to interviews with Kristen on Talk of the Nation and other programs, or read reviews of the book, please visit the American Band website:
http://www.americanbandbook.com/

To listen to some of Kristen Laine’s commentaries on Vermont Public Radio: 

Frost Heaves
http://www.vpr.net/episode/32723/ 

Scrappy
http://www.vpr.net/episode/32596/

Veterans Day
http://www.vpr.net/episode/32559/

Spring Peepers
http://www.vpr.net/episode/32315/

Kristen Laine's author photo, at the beginning of this interview, was taken by Medora Hebert.

 

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.!

****

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

Q&A Follow-up: Readers' Questions for Joe Kelly

By Jon Berry, Insight Trails

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS contacted me about Insight Trails’ interview with Dads and Daughters (DADs) president and co-founder Joe Kelly, published on Sept. 10 (for more, see "Insight Trails Q&A: Joe Kelly"). It's great to get your feedback! The Q&A prompted a number of questions from readers, so I scheduled a follow-up interview with Joe. Here are the results.

Reader Question 1: “Would Joe be willing to talk more about the effect of his alcoholism on his work? [Joe has been in recovery for 27 years.] How did he get from there to the point where he was able to move forward with his life?”

Joe Kelly: When I was still drinking, my work life was sporadic. It was rare for me to keep a job for more than six months. I dropped out or flunked out of college five times. The notion that work would be a source of ongoing fulfillment and challenge was really not on my radar screen. I didn’t care about anything as much as I cared about drinking.

    I always worked. I worked my way through high school. After I left college, I worked a number of jobs. I worked in a clothing factory. I drove a meat delivery truck. I worked in a juvenile home. I worked in traveling repertory theater in Nebraska, driving the truck, setting up and striking sets, doing bit parts as an actor. I worked at a Catholic retreat house. But none of them lasted long.

"There was a lot of laughter at [AA] meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me coming back."

    I eventually got a job as a staff person in a battered women’s shelter in Omaha. God only knows how. Literally. I was very lucky. The shelter focused a lot on looking at family systems and underlying issues like alcoholism. I became aware of the alcoholism in my family tree. My supervisor, who herself was a recovering alcoholic, nudged me to get an alcohol assessment.

    When I was told I had a drinking problem, I panicked. I was 24½ years old. Nancy and I had just gotten married. We were pregnant. I was terrified. I was also miserable. My tolerance had evaporated. Drinking was making me anxious instead of giving me relief. What I was doing wasn’t working.  

    I went to see the priest who’d married us, and I just spewed. “Oh, my God, I’m an alcoholic!” He listened patiently, and at the end, he looked at me calmly and said, “Well, what are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Is there anyone you can talk to?” The next day, I talked with my supervisor. She took me to my first AA meeting. The meeting became my home group.

    It was quickly apparent the people in AA knew what I was going through. Plus they were having a really good time. There was a lot of laughter at meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me coming back. I started doing what they told me to do, and it worked. It wasn’t easy. But my life started becoming more manageable. Life started making a lot more sense.

 I kept the job at the battered women’s shelter. The children were born in August. Then when, they were 9 months old, we moved to Minneapolis and Nancy opened the gallery. I worked almost three years at Roto-Rooter (see main story, Sept. 10).

"Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time."

    Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time. After I’d been sober for four years or so, I started thinking about what I really wanted to do. What kinds of things did I like? I remembered that when I was growing up in New Jersey, I loved listening to WOR radio from New York City, news and interviews all day long. And I loved listening to baseball games on the radio. Brown Institute, a technical school for radio broadcasting, was nearby in Minneapolis.

    I wanted to go right away but couldn’t. My lack of patience was emblematic of my continuing immaturity. We had to rejigger our schedules, and I had to get financial aid lined up. It took about four months, but I finally got in. I found that journalism really suited my personality. Interestingly, several years ago, going through my mother’s things, I found a project I’d done from first grade. I’d glued the mastheads of The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The Star Ledger, The Journal American – the newspapers I grew up with – on construction paper. Inside I’d written, “What I want to be when I grow up: I want to be a reporter.” I have no memory of having created it. I didn’t go into journalism until I was 30.

Reader question 2: "I'm interested in learning more about how Joe and his wife juggle the demands of family and creative life."

Joe Kelly: Ours was an unusual family. When the kids were 11, and we started New Moon, we included them in it. Because the girls were unschooling, they were fully involved. They were part of the creative process. As a result, we were able to live our lives together as a unit and share things in a lot of ways.

    There were issues of balancing work and family, but, because New Moon was headquartered in our house, they weren't the same as some other families.  There were some evenings, for instance, when the kids would be standing at the foot of the stairs shouting up to us in the attic, where Nancy and I would be finishing up something on the magazine, "Come down here and eat dinner!"

"Saying 'It's your turn,' has been less about keeping score and more about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, 'You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause.'"

    Nancy and I have seldom kept score over whose turn it was to earn money. For nearly all our time together, we've both been working and earning money.

    When it comes to the big things, we've said "it's your turn" to one another: me going to radio school after we'd moved to Minnesota for Nancy to start the gallery; Nancy starting  New Moon after we'd moved the family twice for my radio jobs; me helping start DADs after she'd started New Moon.

    I think, though, that saying "It's your turn," has been less about keeping score and more about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, "You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause."

That's I.t.

Q&A: Joe Kelly, Co-Founder and President, Dads & Daughters (DADs)

By Jon Berry, Insight Trails

I FIRST MET JOE KELLY A DECADE AGO, WHEN he came to New York City for the kickoff meeting of New Moon books. With him was a gaggle of 10- to 14-year-old girls who had flown in from across the country to be the editorial board for the books. Not a junior or advisory board but the board, responsible for deciding the content, writing the books, and coaching each other through writer’s block and the other obstacles that writers go through. Joe was there to encourage and support.

    It was a formula that Joe and his wife, Nancy Gruver, had honed to great success with New Moon magazine, the bimonthly publication by, for, and about girls that the couple founded in 1993. The publication, which Nancy continues to run, has won shelves full of awards and been a springboard for a generation of girls to follow their dreams.

    For the past eight years, Joe has advocated for girls on a larger stage, as co-founder and president of Dads and Daughters (DADs), a non-profit group dedicated to advocating for the importance of fathers in daughters’ lives. He has written six books, including Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter (Broadway/Random House, 2002) and The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help Build a Great Relationship (Broadway/Random House, 2007).

    He has testified before Congress, been featured in The New York Times, People, and The Today Show, and talked to hundreds of groups, from professional associations to local parents groups, on issues from fathering, to Title IX, eating disorders, and marketing to kids. The Women’s Sports Foundation and iParenting.com have named him “father of the year.”

    I talked with Joe, an easy-to-smile 52 year old, about his career path, the cues he has taken from his wife and twin daughters, and his belief in the power of transformation, which he has experienced personally as a recovering alcoholic with 27 years of sobriety.

Question: If you could go back to when you were 25 years old and offer yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?

Answer: Be in your own life. Look for inspiration in your own life. The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our own personal lives, loves, and concerns.

Insight: Look to your own life for inspiration. "The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our own personal lives, loves, and concerns."

Q: Would the Joe Kelly of 25-30 years ago be surprised at where you are today?

A: Very surprised. If someone had said to me in my first year of sobriety, “Sit down and make a list of all the things you dream of doing with your life,” that list would be so pathetic compared to what has actually happened. My imagination, my sense of what’s possible, and my sense of my own capabilities were all so stunted.

Q: What would have been on your list?

A: Hold a steady job. Provide for my family. Be a marginal husband. That would have been about it. If someone had really pushed me and asked, “What is the most wild and outrageous thing you could do?” what probably would have come up is a dream I had when I was nine or ten years old to write a book. I would have had no idea what it would have been about, though.

Q: What happened to shift things in your life?

A: Sobriety, and by sobriety I don’t mean just not drinking, but continuous engagement in growing spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, socially. That and having children, and having female children, and two at once!

    A lot of the shifts in my life, though, can be traced to stupidity (laughs) – being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks.

Insight: Be open to taking risks. "A lot of the shifts in my life can be traced to...being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks."

Q: What do you mean?

A: In 1981, we moved from Omaha, Nebraska, to the Twin Cities, so that Nancy and a woman she had been working with could open a contemporary American crafts gallery. It was, on the surface, an incredibly stupid thing to do. We had nine-month-old twins. In four years, the business never paid Nancy a dime. We kept moving from apartment to apartment because we couldn’t afford the rent. I got a job dispatching trucks for Roto Rooter for our steady income.

    About four years later, after the gallery had closed, I decided to enroll in a radio and TV broadcasting program at a for-profit tech school in the Twin Cities. I thought I could get a job doing play-by-play for a Major League Baseball team (another bit of naivete!). I got a job at a hole-in-the-wall breakfast diner, and worked a couple of hours in the morning before school. On the weekend, I delivered newspapers.

    In the course of the program, though, I landed an internship at a radio newsroom. I learned how to call people up, interview them, and write copy, and found I was good at it. While I was still in school, I got hired to be the news director for a radio station in Marshall, a small farming town in southwestern Minnesota. So we packed up and moved again. We didn’t know anybody there. We knew nothing about farming. We’d both grown up in the suburbs. It was 1985. Agriculture was in the midst of a massive catastrophe, and my job was to report on it.

    But I learned on the job. I got to be good at it. It was a big adventure. My stories got picked up. I won awards. I ended up being president of the Minnesota Advisory Board for United Press International.

    Out of that experience, I was hired by Minnesota Public Radio to work in Duluth. Once again, we knew nobody there. We just packed up and went. Nancy got a really good job with a multi-county government agency, starting a pilot program to provide health insurance for the working poor – which she got, in part, because of the job she had found in Marshall being business manager of a hospice.

    In retrospect, we took a lot of stupid leaps not fully realizing how stupid they were. But they worked out. It was the same thing with the magazine. We were too dumb to know it was dumb to do.

Q: How so?

A: We had no experience in magazines. I had experience in journalism, but it was in radio, not print. Serendipitously, the style of writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar. Writing for radio is all in active voice. It’s all short sentences, one thought per sentence. And that’s how you write for children. I didn’t know this at the time, but it worked out perfectly.

Insight: Be open to serendipity. "The style of writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar. I didn’t know this at the time, but it worked out perfectly."

    The idea for the magazine occurred to Nancy literally out of the blue. We had been working in our jobs for about five years, and were getting bored. I started working part-time to spend more time with our kids. Nancy applied for a fellowship to the Kennedy School in Boston to learn more about public health policy. She was a finalist. But she didn’t get it, and she was crushed.

    It became a crisis moment for her: “What do I really want to do?” She knew she’d be passionate about working on girls’ or women’s issues, but had no idea what or how to get there. So the two of us went off for a weekend to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to figure out what we were going to do with our lives. Of course, when we got there, we never talked about it. We read books the whole weekend.

    Finally, on the way home, driving through the Upper Peninsula – this beautiful, desolate landscape – Nancy turned to me and said, “How about a Junior Ms.?” I said, “What?” And she said, “How about a magazine for girls that girls would run?” She says now that the idea just snapped into her head, fully formed. She knew she was going to do it. It was going to happen.

    When we got home, we sat down and talked with the girls, who were 11 at the time (they are now in their late 20s). Their response was, “You’re crazy. You don’t know anything about magazines.” And Nancy said, “Well, OK. We know that. But let’s say we could figure out that part. Would you be interested?” And we all stayed up until 1 o’clock in the morning talking about what it would look like.

    Literally nine months later, the first issue came out.

Q: This was Nancy’s idea. Why did you get involved?

A: We had talked for some time about wanting to work together. We thought it would be fun to do. Nancy had done a lot of interesting work. She’d owned her own business, and, through the agency work, had made an impact in our community. She’s creative. I’m good at envisioning the next step, and how to get there. And I had experience in journalism. We were both concerned about the girls, and sexism, and the world the girls were growing up in. We didn’t know what the idea was going to become. We just thought it was a good idea, and the girls and their friends and the mothers of their friends thought it was a good idea.

    As I look back on my work life, in nearly all of the cases, the jobs I’ve taken and careers I’ve had have been presented to me. They came along and I was ready. I’ve sometimes longed to be the kind of person who plans ahead and plots things out, and decides with certainty that this is the work they want to do for the rest of their life. But that’s not how my life has worked. Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life, and I have faith they will.

Insight: Have faith. "Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life."

Q: When did you start pulling back from your jobs?

A: I quit my job first, before the first issue came out. I had written a press release on New Moon and sent it out to a bunch of newspapers. A reporter from the Duluth newspaper followed up and did a feature story on the magazine and its process. The story got picked up by Knight-Ridder’s news service and ran in newspapers across the country. Our phone started ringing off the hook. We had hundreds of people subscribing before we’d even printed the first issue.

    So I left my job and started answering the phone and entering subscriptions. Nancy kept working awhile longer because she was making more money. We refinanced our house and took out $10,000. Things mostly fell into place.

Q: Was there an a-ha moment, when you realized “we can do this”?

A: Not exactly. We did things instinctively. We were presumptuous. We had faith. Looking back, a lot of things converged to help us. And not just the successes. Nancy starting the craft gallery, and having it fail, was an important learning experience. It gave her concrete experience in how to manage a business. It also taught her the most important lesson for entrepreneurs: you have to be able to pay yourself. You can have a great idea, but it’s not good enough if it can’t support you.

    The way we ran the magazine, with the adults creating a space for the kids to exercise their own powers, was something we learned from unschooling our children. That also was risky – in unschooling, kids set their own path – but it worked.

Q: Was there fear?

A: Mostly fear about money. We still are fearful about scarcity. We have always been frugal. Since the first loan, New Moon has never taken out a loan. It's cash-flowed everything it’s done. We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone.

Q: What was it like to work with your wife?

A: It was a lot of fun. But it could also be a source of tension. We had to work really hard at separating our work life and our home life. That meant not investing a work disagreement with the baggage of our home life. We had to learn that, when we disagree about a color to use in the magazine, there’s a fairly decent possibility we’re just disagreeing about the color. It’s not just one more example that Nancy thinks I’m a blithering idiot. She may really think green is better.

    It still happens when we work together, but I think we’re better at surfacing the tension more quickly. One of us will recognize right away, “This is about something else,” and pierce it, or back off, until we can sit down and talk about what’s really bothering us.

Q: How have you applied the lessons you’ve learned in your current job with Dads & Daughters?

A: A lot of what underlies my work is questioning the way things are. It’s the journalistic instinct. I think it’s especially true for people who have gone through life-or-death transformations like getting sober. You realize it’s possible for things to be radically changed.

Insight: Change is possible. "[When you've been] through a life-or-death transformation, you realize it's possible for things to be radically changed."

Q: DADs has gotten attention for challenging companies’ marketing messages.

A: There are a lot of ads out there that celebrate qualities you don’t want to see in kids. What we’ve tried to do is track down the head of the companies – many of whom are men and fathers – and ask them to re-imagine the ads’ messages as something they would say to their daughters. It’s making the personal political.

    If you put it in this context, an ad that says, “4 out of 5 girls you hate ask for it by name. Stop hating them. Starting being them” – a real ad, by the way, for a hair product – is absurd. You wouldn’t teach your daughter to hate other people, or to become like the people they hate.

    In that case, the company’s first response, from the marketing director, was to ignore us. But then we got a personal letter from the CEO. He said he’d been on vacation with his children when our letter arrived. He went on to say that when he got back, he called together his team and told them pull the ads and “never to do anything like that again.”

    A lot of times, when we send letters to companies, we get no response. But almost all the time, when we can engage companies in conversation, they do what we ask.

Insight: Connect. "What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it."

Q: You also focus energy on education.

A: In a sense, my role is to be the “spokesdad.” The core of that is working to raise the profile of father-daughter relationships, to inspire fathers and stepfathers to get more involved in their daughters’ lives, and to give them tools to be better fathers. Fathers and stepfathers have an incredible influence in their daughters’ lives. Too many don’t realize it, and the culture doesn’t acknowledge it.

    What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it. Sometimes that just means creating a space for dads to think and talk. When I go out to a school and speak about fathering to a room of 200 fathers, the thing that happens that makes a real difference is when those 200 guys sitting in the room look around and say, “There’s 199 other guys here who feel this is important. I’m not alone.” It’s an inspiring experience. It certainly inspires me.

That's "It"

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Resources for going further:

For more on Dads & Daughters, including tips for fathering daughters and ways to get involved, see www.dadsanddaughters.org .

To learn more about Joe's new book The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help Build a Great Relationship, and buy a copy, go to www.amazon.com .

To learn more about his book Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter When She's Growing Up So Fast, go to www.amazon.com .

For more about New Moon magazine, or start a subscription, go to www.newmoon.org .

For more on unschooling, see The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn, at www.amazon.com , or John C. Holt’s web site, or visit the web site www.unschooling.com .