Euphemistically Speaking

Dear readers (all twelve of you), I have been absent for a while as I adjust to the working world. In addition to building The Karuna Project's private practice, I am a Bereavement Counselor at Holy Name Hospice now, several days a week. It is wonderful, sometimes painful but very meaningful work. I hope to be more present on this blog in the future!

Words, words, words.  We all use them but they often mean subtly different things to each of us.  Words are affected by interpretation, culture, by the books we read or do not read. Choreographer Pina Bausch said that "words can't do more than just evoke things" adding that this was the purpose of art.

This is why I love poetry.  The literal words, distilled down to a minimal essence of expression, evoke more than inform. In poetry, there is a visceral resonance that speaks to the heart.  Reading a poem, a curious and literally minded colleague asked me, "but what does it MEAN?"  I dislike picking apart the meaning of poems. Listen, flow with them. FEEL what it means to you.  It's like staring at a Rothko painting; at first it is just a blue canvas, a pretty color. You think, what does it mean? Open your heart, your eyes, enter the color. Movement exits there, deep blue washes you. The painting becomes a meditation, awakening feelings, associations, stillness. This resonance cannot be described, even though I am attempting to do so.  It must be felt.

Grief is like that too. Someone said, "I cannot speak about this, it is too deep." Talking helps, but no words can really describe the dark abyss, the agitation, fear, the dissonance of life after a death. And we are hindered by a habit of using euphemisms that purposely obscure grief.  He "passed away."  This might be a good descriptor of a quiet, peaceful death but it doesn't work for a sudden one. She's "gone to a better place."  This is comforting to many people, but infuriating to some. I "lost" my husband.  A woman in one group asked testily, "why do we say he is lost?"  He's not a set of keys or one of my three pairs of glasses that have gone missing.

Good question.  "Loss" refers to what WE have lost – our partner, lover, friend, mother, sister, daughter. The loss of this relationship is what we mourn. The loss is of whom we are, our role, even our purpose. The hole in the middle of our lives where that person is not creates a place in which we wander, yearning, seeking a way to repair the chasm into which we plunged at the moment of death.

So why talk at all? Words are what we use to build a bridge.  Words are how we connect to each other, and when we speak, we also evoke. The position of our body, whether or not we are making eye contact, the tone of voice, our eyes welling up with tears,  color our words. These subtle clues create a responsive resonance. The listener, understanding and sympathizing, evokes a metaphorical buoy we can hold on to.

Maybe words have no literal truth at all. The Heart Sutra of Buddhism says form is emptiness, emptiness is form.  I use my words to reach you and perhaps they do.  Or maybe each word leaves my mouth and disappears into nothingness, flitting by you like a wisp of air, barely noticed. While I am no longer inside the chasm, I sometimes sit on its edge, dangling my feet down into the dark. If you want to know about it, maybe you could just sit next to me for a while. Sometimes I just can't speak about it.

A Hurricane Dance Party

The news is playing endless loops of bright red and green spirals, the animated edges of Hurricane Irene which is heading our way. The dark clouds are Irene's tentacles reaching out to cover us, about to open up. We sit in suspension, before the deluge. People have been in excited panic for days; stores sold out of D batteries and large containers of water in a matter of minutes after opening, and someone told me gleefully that one store sold $24,000 worth of generators in an hour on Friday morning.

Even as I attempted to liken the hyped up terror to those 6 pages of possible side effects (including death) that come along with prescription drugs, I too have been very agitated. Perhaps it is the energy of nervous people around or maybe it is the anxiety of my daughter, trying to finish her last week as a nanny while packing for a four month trip to Italy. She has insisted on taking only one suitcase which required several elimination sessions, color coordination choices and teetering around in various shoes, with a quizzical expression. "Should I take the neutral heels or the hot pink ones?" she wondered. I reminded her that Florence is cobbled and heels might not be the best choice at all. She snapped at me because apparently I know nothing about dressing for night life, which of course is true.

The packing dilemmas are all moot now. New York City has completely shut down; for the first time ever, all modes of transportation have been halted. The airports are closed. Even Broadway is closed. Over 370,000 people have been evacuated. After hours on hold, we finally got through to the travel agency and the earliest she can leave is on Friday.

One thing is clear: Irene is bigger than all of us, bigger even than Europe and we have no control over what she will do. She may weaken and everyone will feel a bit foolish. Or the predictions could hold; lower Manhattan with its honeycombed tunnels and subway tubes could be underwater. We could lose power here in the country, but we are prepared for that.

So why am I so agitated? It always comes back to uncertainty. Not knowing touches an edge of extreme fear in my psyche and in my body; before I am aware of it, I am tense and churlish. I overreact to the slightest tone. You would think I would get this at some point – the lesson of sudden death should have taught me that I have no control anyway. All my talk about staying in the moment ought to have honed some skill. Yet I feel like an unhinged possible projectile, waiting to be caught up by a hurricane wind and thrown against a tree.

Oh well. I can't control Irene, I can't control the airlines or the newscasters. I can calm down though; I could bake something nice. We could put on some loud music and have a Hurricane Party until the lights go out, then continue by candlelight. Sounds like a plan….one which I can control.

Contemplating Movement

I took a Contemplative Dance workshop with Alton Wasson last weekend. His work comes out of Authentic Movement, and he calls it "movement as spiritual practice, artistic resource and psychological narrative." For me, it felt like coming home. My body is my home, the shape in which I live, breathe, and have my being. My body is also the conduit for the expression of thoughts and feelings, not only in words but also in movement and space.

Ever since I could walk, I expressed how I felt in and through my body. As a little girl, I twirled with joy on the lawn; I waved my arms and leapt about, mimicking the movement of the trees and flowers. As I studied dance and learned a larger movement vocabulary, I began creating dances and performing them. The initial inspiration was always based on how an event or interaction felt and was expressed through the body.

We tend to forget this. We often are unaware of the coded messages, the subtle cues our bodies are sending when we are communicating. Arny Mindell calls these secondary messages – our voices might be saying "How nice to see you," to someone we don't care for, and our body tenses, our chin drops down and the person to whom we speak has a momentary confusion. They hear the words and believe them but they are also picking up the secondary "I don't like you" message. Mindell works with these secondary channels, asking clients to perceive them, to amplify them and clarify their meaning.

The clarification opens the possibility for transformation. If I notice that a difficult emotion is locked into a part of my body, I can work through the feeling with movement. By releasing the tension, the emotion is allowed to flow. By flowing with it, I transform it. If fear hunches me over, drawing my shoulders up and my arms tight around my chest, I can roll my shoulders back and open my arms. I can shift my stance and awaken some courage in the face of fear.

Moving through emotion and giving it free expression within the body is very healing. There was one session in the workshop that was hard for me because sorrow welled up, unwanted. I was resistant, yet it was real and I had to let it flow for a while. I also noticed that I seemed stuck in one spot a lot of the time, and took this for a metaphor of being afraid to move forward. In another movement session, I let myself travel all over the room, feeling the freedom of forward motion, and discovered that staying in one place was not necessarily being stuck. Being rooted could mean that I am growing.