Friendship, Wounds, and More...Close the Door

A counterpoint now arrives, close behind received wisdom in “opening the door.”

Sometimes I sit with whatever prose has come in the morning, and it deepens an ability to rest somehow throughout the day. Whatever ‘overt’ work I may be doing, a rootedness or satisfaction from opening to the prose allows a certain flexible weathering of my own or my community’s craziness in achievement, intellect, and politicking. Other times, when I sit with the prose of the morning in my mind throughout the day, I realize I had to leave earlier than its completion. Meandering on errands this morning, I realized I’ve learned just as much—perhaps more—from relationships that have indeed ended, in any practical, day-to-day sense. Relationship with folks whom I no longer see or interact with in any meaningful fashion. It’s tempting to think of this phenomenon of closure as “closing the door,” but I think it’s more accurate to describe it as “opening the door only one of us wanted to open.” At any rate, this notion of the door needs another look.

An illustration, perhaps. I found myself in a Facebook tiff about a week ago, not of my making. I was tagged in an indirect query which had arisen from an incendiary blog-post of an unknown faculty person from another institution of theological, or at least biblical, learning. The question was one of confrontation and orthodoxy and the avenue selected by this well-meaning but unwise fellow was Facebook. Ultimately, the deans of each institution handled it professionally "offline" and little actual damage was done, mostly because there had been no relationship of note to damage. The student, however, may have become a casualty of a kind. Collateral damage in a tiff he had started.

I was intrigued by my own non-participation/participation in the whole thing. As always, there was the overt appearance of dispute and then the hidden but driving splinter in the psyche of one of the actors. A public scuffle masking a deep wounding committed by none of those in the dispute. What an old story that is! Twenty-two posts had been logged before I even checked into my own page. Do I join my voice to say, at the very least, this is not the venue for these things? Does even saying that in the venue mean I’m already surrendering ground? Or would I be opening a new door for truer, more vulnerable communication in better forms, offline?

I chose to participate to say I was not going to participate online. Not surprisingly, the main antagonist did not believe me. Can’t blame him, actually. So I posted a second time, to accept responsibility for all that had transpired since my first post, to ask forgiveness for choosing incorrectly. Each time, I attempted to communicate a boundary necessary for true communication to happen ‘offline,’ if it were to be pursued. Each time, the requested boundary was transgressed.

The student approached one last time, just to me, in a chat-box.  “Hi.” he said. “Hi.” Said I, waiting to see whether he would respect the boundary I had expressly stated was necessary. He wrote, “What do you think about the…[same issue, same words]?” Boundary transgressed, after twice-definition. I repeated the boundary a third time. He responded with aggression about my work. I crafted as peaceful a response as I could, with blessing, with encouragement for sustained engagement with those God was putting in his life. Then I said good-bye. I ended the Facebook friendship, cut all ties. Did I close the door, or open one?

As in any question like that, the answer is “yes.” In one sense, all this is a straw horse of an example because rarely are Facebook friendships actual friendships in the sense I intend the word. Lots of media-chatter and literature about that topic. But in another sense, it’s a ‘safe’ example in which to explore the absolutely crucial skill of recognizing and maintaining healthy boundaries in relational and professional lives today. Most of us are increasingly out of practice, for one thing. Global connectivity and instant-access have diffused personal awareness of self-other, the integrity of an “I” self-differentiated enough to be in intimate relationship with another “I”. Much easier is it to remain open all the time, to be shaped and tossed by all the actions and agencies in personal and media forces available today, all those inputs of action and data made immediate by technology and increased felt-disconnection from the earth, from self, from one another. “Open the door” in this sense often means “closing down” what needs time to grow. Relinquishing what is life-giving for what is immediate and available, even if it’s unhealthy and destructive of life in community.

There is an art to knowing how to articulate a boundary while remaining in relationship. “Opening the door” to the wound as that on which new light shines, new life may grow in unexpected strength. Seeing that boundary transgressed, learning through it, perhaps forgiving, and sustaining connection. But no less important is knowing how to discern when the boundary is more important to respect than the relationship is to continue, at least in its current form.

How does one learn to recognize non-negotiable boundary-lines in deepening intimacies? How does one practice honoring them in oneself first, then making it possible for others to know how to honor them as well? Lastly, how does one offer enough opportunity for grace to grow amidst injury or transgression, if it will, but then choose ‘home’ or ‘rest’ or ‘safety’ over persistent transgression of boundaries?

In the Facebook case listed here, it was a relatively easy choice. The technological dimension of reading, receiving, taking time to consider, then typing, writing responses allowed prayerful intention and communication as clearly as one could muster (if not achieve). It was relatively easy to open opportunity to see whether respect would be accorded, whether grace might grow. When neither occurred, formenting irritation but no real injury, it was an easy choice to discern healthy relationship practice with exclusion of all those who acted unhealthily for my articulated sense of ‘home,’ ‘safety,’ ‘rest.’

Move the challenge into the family, or into the intimate life of marriage. What if continued interaction with a family member brings nothing but passive-aggressive wounding, disrespect coated in sugary tones, unmet fear cloaked in feigned concern? For the sake of family, do you a) sustain the injuries without justice or recompense or b) remove yourself from the fray in as peaceful a fashion as possible? Or what if the one who has promised to love you “until death does part” begins to verbally disrespect you, even abuse you in tone and in speech? If the scriptures to which you accord authority say, “You must forgive, seventy-times-seven times,” but each time you forgive, the abuse gets worse…when do you finally love yourself fully enough to choose health, safety, rest, home?

It’s so tempting to say there are times to “close the door” on such relationships, and there’s truth to that statement. But I don’t think the opposite direction to “open the door” offers suitable answer anymore. It may be time for a relationship to end, for the two who have been most privy to its life…and then its death…to decide that no intention for continued companionship can live in health and happiness. It may be time to honor the relationship most by letting its shape or form become something totally different—no contact but prayerful concern all the same, minimal contact and enacted blessing from safe distance. For such things do not mean that connection or relation no longer exists, like a door has been closed on the fingers of life that continue to grasp what had been between you. It may very well be—especially if one puts any stock in the notion of interconnection and interdependence of us all—that the sense of connection or relationship has increased, but is simply no longer observable within social interactions. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, or look, connection in absence may be the only way to live a life-giving connection. Allowing what has been done to others to stop being done, at least by you. Opening doors to new avenues of wholeness, even if s/he does not want them, or know s/he wants them.

In the end, if both are choosing life, though in separate paths, marking a conclusion of relationship, then both are doing what promises most wholeness. They are actually opening the door, not closing it. Both are sustaining the pain of finite separation or disagreement in order that both may continue along a now separate way toward wholeness, toward the sacred, toward Life. True, it may be that only one of the two (or the many) realizes that to open such a door to a painful conclusion is actually opening the door to wholeness, to the sacred, to Life. And there are times when we will never know whether the conclusion we stewarded, the boundary we chose to honor over the observable relationship continuing, was actually the life-giving thing to do. But in a strange way, what often looks like "closing the door" may actually be opening it. The door is about an opening to life, after all, not grasped connection.

In an unhelpful (perhaps) but increasingly palpable way, I’m learning that my body may know more about this phenomenon than any other part of me. I’ve begun to ask, “What course of action brings oxygen to my gut, my heart, my spirit?” “What action brings life-energy-qi-verve, not only to me but to those with whom I travel in practice, in faith?” Am I willing to acknowledge the limitations in myself, in others, and commit to choosing life, even if it means disagreeing with another or removing myself from communal affirmation? Can I accept the container I have created--or that has been created on this path emptily called 'mine'--and steward it in all its finitude and definition?

I'll close, at least this time, by opening that door. Perhaps with practice, we learn more for every 'next time.'

Friendship, Wounds, and More...Open the Door

[With deep appreciation to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, my teacher.]

Do you have friends who have betrayed you? Or angered you? Misled you or done something that pained you deeply? Perhaps I should have prefaced that with “If you are a person of faith, one of a deeply rooted historical tradition, do you have friends who have wounded you in some fashion?” I invite you to reflect on it a little. Really think of those who are closest to you, those you consider friends. Strangely, the answer I wish for you is “Yes, I do. Yes, those closest in my life have wounded me in some fashion.” Some masochistic notion here? Not at all. The wounding is not the point, nor do I wish such things on any sentient being. Painful. Destructive of trust and faith. At least at first, if one is fortunate. The point here, of awareness and of interest, is observing the relationship beyond the wound, the potential transformation that comes in multiple lives because of the wound.

Christian theological education these last decades has attempted to maximize on a notion of “the wounded healer.” Henri Nouwen is the name usually associated with it, as he wrote a short book with that title. I like Henri Nouwen. Respect his path of discipleship, the costs with which he walked his tradition. The notion of “wounded healers” has done great damage to our understanding of religious leadership, however. I hate the notion of “wounded healers.” The phrase draws our focus to the wound, for one thing. Churches are full today of those who are wounded but refuse the work of right medicine and healing that produce scars and strength. I was startled recently into an awareness that as a church leader, I'm simply not accustomed to being around strong people, those who are confident in their being and steward their own growth, healing. The phrase also places "healing" as a thing leaders do for others, not what life-giving relationship creates for us all. We focus on the wound or the healer, in other words, not the transformation or the relationship that survives the wound to teach us all something deeper.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of wounds at some length in some of her spoken work, Theatre of the Imagination, concluding with a chant of invitation to holy life, to transformative encounter with God. The etymological roots of “wound” connect with a “wonder,” a great “wonder” of the world, of an age, of life. She mentions the Pyramids. The Seven Wonders of the World. A wound in this sense speaks of a separation, a place where light comes in anew. Perhaps with great pain. Perhaps unintentionally. But a new opening, hole, door where light had not shone before. There’s nothing special about the wound itself, only the light that comes into it.

Wounds, she notes, also require cleansing. If one is to heal what has torn open, it must be cleansed with the right medicine. Also painful. But then healing. Then a scar. And scar tissue is many times stronger than skin that has never been wounded. One of the lines in her closing chant, “Abre la Puerta,” “Open the Door,” says it well: “All strong souls must first go to hell before they do the healing work they came here for.” Wounds healed with the right medicine make souls strong. They create the souls able to do healing work in the world. But then she moves to the point, to the path beyond any wound or any healing.

All this, any felt wounding, is a door. It is an opening to awaken to all that is holy, to all that connects us, to interdependence known in one’s bones. I think this is the most difficult and most liberating way to being fully human, to allow suffering or whatever wound we have sustained in our most vulnerable places to be a door to sacred consciousness, to awakening, to awareness. To see a Life that connects us in ways we could never have known except for knowing separation, cleansing, union. Nope, we lament the wound. We look for someone, a healer, to ease the pain. We forget we have been given resources of life-giving relationship with others that releases, unlocks, for our own healing, our own awakening.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps it’s not like that in your experience, and perhaps even the notions here will be misunderstood and bastardized into something ugly. Most folks I know who parlay in religious life today bump up against different-others and sense a wounding, feel a pain of separation or difference. Then they leave the church, choosing instead to go to one that is more comfortable, that doesn't hurt them. Until it happens again. One couple in a small town I know was vehemently against the notion of the two mainline churches merging into one, for the good of both. I do not know for sure, but I do suspect a major reason was because they bounced back and forth between the two distinct churches, whenever they had an argument or disagreement with the pastor of one of them. If the churches merged, how would they escape discomfort? But then what they miss! Without the discomfort, without the wounding, there's no way to truly know the love that's stronger and deeper than all that. Loving deeply means walking through suffering...as a door.

This is not to say discomfort or suffering is good, again, it's just unavoidable. (Thanks to the Buddhists again). Those who live in relationship with others who have wounded them in some fashion, who have found a life-giving way to sustain connection with them, know and manifest a Life that’s deeper than the wound, deeper than the inhuman ways we can be with one another. Those who remain friends with others who have pained them in some way know a freedom and acceptance in a living relationship with a force of its own. When someone makes a mistake, does something he will regret later, he knows that both are yet committed to a shared Life bigger than either of them.

So I’m beginning to look for truly religious folks, by which I mean all those who have been wounded and have remained in a relationship of life-giving power and contribution with those who have wounded them. Religion is not usually defined in this way, true. And there are so many of us who remain in relationships that wound, not manifesting anything life-giving at all but out of fear of loss, grief, and more. But deeply rooted religious practitioners know this truth about life-giving relationship and contribution to the world around them.

Truly religious people know what some call the first noble truth of suffering. They know they will encounter woundedness in themselves and in others…and they gently smile in its face. They are the ones who practice bringing light to the wounds, placing the right medicine at the right times, living through wounds as doors to sacred consciousness, awakening. They stand strong against despair and hopelessness that can seep into wounds or rage in fevers. These wise ones guide our paths to practice living a path of interconnection with all that is larger and livelier than any specific wounding could ever be.If you are one of the lucky ones, you have friends who have wounded you in some way. Or perhaps better to say, those who have wounded you have become friends. I wonder if that's what Jesus meant when he said, "Love your enemies..." Wounds, cleansed and healed rightly, with just the right medicine and internal sustenance, temper love deeper than knowledge or desire. Wounds can grow us into lovers of God, friends of God, divine lovers of all.

Nothing more difficult. Hard work. But good work, if you can get it.

The Feat (Gift) of Loneliness

Loneliness seems to creep in on little cat feet, not unlike Sandburg’s fog. Do you know when you’re lonely? I mean really know? Last weekend, while my beloved was away at work, I found myself restless. Unmoored, somehow. Aimless. There is very little more disorienting for high-functioning achievers than restlessness, unmoored-ness, aimlessness. My ego did its ususal machinations for relief-while-in-control: talk with friends or family about other things, read up on Buddhist meditation (without practice, mind you), rotate through my contacts lists to see if one jumped out as someone to contact. That’s the title of the list, right? Time passed and then it was time to be at my evening commitment—a women’s circle. Upon my return, all restlessness, unmoored-ness, aimlessness had completely vanished,  receded. It dawned on me belatedly that I had been lonely.

I find this to be a strange state of affairs, for several reasons. It’s most essentially odd because I am blessed with family and friends, colleagues and good work to do. I have spent more time away from home this past summer than I ever have before, and one of the fruits of awareness has been how very rich and interconnected my life of work and practice is right where I live. I thrive at peripheries of communities, which means life comes to me from multiple directions and worldviews, through markedly different people who are willing to share a bit of their time and gifts with me. Some relationships root deeply, having been tempered by conflicts sustained and resolved across difference, betrayal, misunderstanding. Others are as deep-reflective or deep-playful (or not) as we want them to be, dependent upon temperament, inclination, desire.  How is it possible to feel loneliness in such a web of care and concern, mutual passion and diverse enjoyment?

I also find this strange because I couldn’t see it, name it, … admit it? There seems to be some shame or guilt or something attached to the phenomenon of loneliness that encourages us to ignore seeing it, realizing it. That’s fascinating, I think. Why does loneliness bring a sense of shame or embarrassment with it? In most of our cases, I would imagine, loneliness does not signal an inability to relate but simply a felt-emptiness of relationship for a time. It’s not like we haven’t learned how to connect or to contribute, but more like we yearn for more connection or contribution at the same time there is an apathy or resistance to it. I didn’t like the aimlessness of it all, but I also didn’t feel like doing anything about it. I yearned but resisted…what? I’m not sure. For whatever reason, I could not articulate that I was lonely. It was too quiet and I felt isolated. Surrounded by people, in one sense, but absent within as well.

Two ‘take-aways’ for me from this experience I hope will continue to teach me. One, I seem to have particular behaviors that signal this restlessness but which rarely feed it with any rest. Persistent e-mail checking. Facebook lurking. Compulsive tidying around the house. If I cannot articulate or sense when I’m feeling this disconnection or loneliness, perhaps I can track its agency in my habitual behaviors or patterns of thought expressed these ways. If I become aware I’m doing one of those things, I hope to listen for whether I’m yearning-resisting something (and yes, I’ve wondered whether it means Someone…) in particular.

Second, I’m beginning to listen for this loneliness and embarrassment about it in the lives of pastoral colleagues. I’ve begun to wonder whether religious leaders are ultimately some of the loneliest among us, seeking solace within theological education because that’s where it seems logical to find such solace—God, church, vocational direction and purpose. Ultimately, meaning, significance.  It’s no secret that pastors are some of the most potentially lonely, because their role sets them apart from the community for particular purposes, service. Ordination is about this setting apart. But what if our ‘best and brightest’ in faith community life are being drawn into environments where they seek intimacy and solace in community but find only obligation and duty? Will they recognize their own loneliness, meeting it in healthy ways outside of their work? Or will they substitute the full-bodied, high-Spirited intimacy that can be found within and outside of the institutional church with the slight connections to significance in religious duties? How do we serve out of abundance, not need, if we cannot even recognize when we’re lonely?

Loneliness does seem to have little cat feet after all, signifying a certain fog. Sandburg was right in his imagery, even if he couldn’t have intended this use of it. Little acts of mindfulness may offer a bit of the yellow fog-lighting necessary to make our way in its midst. It seems not to be a shame or an embarrassment, then, as much as an opportunity to experience seeing as surprise, knowing one’s own need(s) and being patient in the discomfort of self-insufficiency. In that, there’s a beauty. Walking in the fog simply requires a willingness to wear the proper attire (finitude, humility) and to welcome the cleansing mists (need, emptiness). Perhaps loneliness comes to those who have been given glimpses of intimacy in order to remind us all how sustaining it is, in presence and in felt-absence...both.

Hunger's Many Tongues

Hunger speaks in many tongues. I say this a bit “in-cheek” because my own experience of it seems to be changing, different than it was, as I pursue the body-literacy path with perspective from the core. I’ve also encountered the work of Jan Chozen Bays, Zen practitioner-teacher and author of Mindful Eating (Shambala, 2009), who has charted a helpful schema by which to imagine hunger’s various expressions, languages, tongues. My mind likes nothing if not a helpful schema.

Chozen Bays identifies seven different kinds of hungers (Chapter Two), the most basic kind of hunger being physiologic, a request of our body for food, for warmth and survival. Other kinds of hungers, as human beings who have multiple and complex impulses of mind and body, include eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cellular hunger, mind hunger, and heart hunger. She also adds a kind of hunger that is actually thirst. Her supposition here is that ability to discern the kind(s) of hunger at play in any given moment creates a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating.

Too many of us thoroughly enjoy eating, you might argue. Too many and too much! Well, yes and no. Most Americans I know have a quite conflicted relationship with food. For instance, the foodie culture I love, in which I thrive. Many of us within these circles do live a life of delight focused upon food—its origin, freshness, exquisite taste combinations, artistry and more—but many of us are also more driven by it, to odd ends, than perhaps seems rational to others. We may visit four different grocery stores, taking well over 3-4 hours, in order to get just the quality of ingredients we desire.  While that may be entertaining, it also suggests a drive that is about more than just the food. Food is the focus, but its extraneous qualities of artistry and perfection in culture and taste organize this relationship to food.

Others, you may say, enjoy food too much—too much of it, too often. How often do we pull away from a restaurant table, with bodies in great discomfort because we’ve eaten what corporate restaurants have decided is one portion of food? A portion that would probably serve between 2-3 people, if not more in less-developed areas of the world? Is that enjoyment, or a mindless attention to other things while food is going into the body? What is enjoyable about such body-discomfort, in the end?

Chozen Bays observes the play-hard, eat a little, play hard habits of healthy young children. “Eating is secondary to the business of being a child,” she writes. And then she continues, “As these intuitive eaters grow older, eating is no longer a fueling stop. Food begins to serve many purposes. It is used to sooth, to distract, to procrastinate, to numb, to entertain, to seduce, to reward, and even to punish. The once straightforward relationship between hunger, eating, and satisfaction of our childhood becomes tangled up in all sorts of thoughts and emotions.” (p. 16). Speaking as a woman of classical (if not contemporary) beauty, I see the unwilling captivity of women in their/our mind-chatter about food all the time. Those who are so thin that food—or the willed lack of it—is a counter-intuitive way of being in control, sometimes to the point of dying (in extreme anorexia or bulima, for instance). Or those who eat what our culture force-feeds them, hiding themselves in layers of fat or clothes that are too large for their forms. That’s actually my strategy of choice. I will consistently wear clothes at least one size too large. Great way to avoid excess attention from men or women focused upon contemporary images of physical beauty and the cathected ways of forcing food/eating habits into conformity with this imagined ‘end.’

So how does one establish a healthy relationship with food, a mindful pathway whereby we may thoroughly enjoy eating, without attachment, drive, mental-captivity? Chozen Bays’s way is to discern which kind of hunger may be in play in each situation where food enters into awareness or choice. I do like the Zen wisdom with which she begins. “The Zen teachings encourage us not to worry about who started all this anxiety or guilt, or who is to blame for our unwholesome habit patterns around food. … The question we are interested in is, can we change it? If so, who can change it?” (p. 17). She says, “Yes,” to the first, and “Only you. You, just as you are,” to the second. Though I’ve not immersed myself in the book cited here, I have already found its mindful way of listening for kinds of hunger inordinately useful. I’m not nearly as straightforward about hunger as I used to think!

I’ve learned that there are ways to feed hungers that don’t involve eating at all. The longer I’ve engaged a diversity of body-practices—whether it be yoga in the morning, sitting practice at my (ir)regular intervals, gym-workouts, personal training, or more—the more satiated and whole my life has seemed to be. There are hungers in my way of being in the world, in other words, that I have traditionally understood as body/stomach hunger when in reality they were desires for visual stimulus, movement, deeper breathing or extended awareness, deeper connection. Because I’m a foodie, it was natural to look to food to satisfy any restlessness that emerged in my life. Because I’m an intensely verbal, mind-driven person, it was also natural to try to get out of my mind-chatter by means of food artistry, social engagements around food with friends.

I am also learning that I have been lonely in different parts of my body, a loneliness that food numbed but could never satisfy. My core, for instance. The more consistently I devote my way of seeing the world in a mindful path that moves through the core into the world, the less self-loathing I experience at my mid-section. The less disconnected I feel from my life, my family/friends, my world. The less hungry I am for substitutionary attachments, those things I attempt to grasp to cover over the needs or vulnerabilities I feel.

Ultimately, I’m beginning to experience hunger not as a fearful deprivation, that shaky-hungry sensation of not having enough and needing more immediately, but as a gentle signal that some new connection might be offered out in the world into my life. There’s a patient curiosity that seems to arise now as I feel a lack or emptiness that my mind begins to open to, listen for...to learn its name or ‘kind,’ its guidance or direction. Am I looking for beauty, artistry, attuned to eye hunger? When I smell freshly baked bread, am I really hungry for bread or do I just miss my family, like my father, who baked bread weekly when I was growing up? Am I seeking comfort or food? Stomach hunger is the one that drives me the most, so closely located and associated with pangs of anxiety and emptiness or loneliness I may feel in my core. As I have relied upon my mind for so very long, to navigate these hungers and needs for connection, mind hunger, allied with heart hunger, are close seconds with stomach hunger. Will this food assuage my fear, my anxiety, my intellectual prowess? I've even gone without food when I was hungry in order to enact my mind's strange sense of intellectual devotion. Sacrificing body food for mental focus somehow has been an act of prayer. Chozen-Bays calls this combination heart hunger, a signal of need for deeper connection in relationship somehow.

Regardless of name/kind, each of these 'hungers' now has a voice, a tongue, by which I may hear a new word, see a new image, sense a new way to be in the world. Each is a gentle signal, amidst my remaining (and probably constant) tasks of navigating food, society, and body demands and invitations. Hunger, of its multiple kinds, has become a welcome teacher. In this way, I still know loneliness, emptiness (not of the Buddhist kind), need, but there’s a spaciousness or breath about it, giving it a soft landing in my mind, my awareness.

I was sitting at breakfast yesterday morning, with my beloved. It was important for us to return to one of our favorite hang-outs for an early Shabbat-esque meal of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. This place does make the best pancakes I’ve ever tasted. I enjoyed ordering the weekly special. The scrambled eggs were just perfect. The bacon was heavenly. The one pancake with butter and syrup took on its Platonic ideal-form in my mouth and nose, with whiff of vanilla. And then enough became enough, at just the right moment. My body smiled, literally smiled, from the core of my ‘me.’

Eating, enjoyed thoroughly.

Mid-Section Blues Becomes a Willing Unknowing: Bodywork Literacy 101

My "mid-section blues" are growing into new form, perhaps best described as “bodywork literacy 101." Few but highly-verbal academics care about such semantic differences, but the more I examined the “blues” in voices I’ve valued, and the more I’ve received gifts from “living life from perspective of a liberated core,” the less appropriate the term “blues” has become. I’ll weave a bit of textual-resourcing here alongside some new narrative, all toward a more refined, ‘spoken’ intention within which to engage the practice(s) and listening-learning to come.

“The blues” as defined by James H. Cone, systematic theology professor at Union Seminary in NYC, is as good a place to start as any. (The Spirituals and the Blues, Orbis Books, 1972, 1991, 2004; what follows is paraphrased and cited from Chapter Six, 97-128). Written in 1972, this now-classic work of Cone argues against any white co-optation of the term “blues” for any of their/our experience. Cone, in other words, would bristle at even a metaphorical use of the term to wrestle with my embodied experience, because I am white. Fair enough. My socio-cultural location and history do mean I have absolutely no entrance into the experience of black people, except that which they welcome me into, translating every step of the way in what might be called ‘compassionate companionship.’ But metaphorical use relies precisely on that dichotomy, that “not-ness” brought up against “is-ness.”  Metaphor allows indirect teaching, learning, sharing, which is open to all who will open to it.

Within the “not-ness” so assumed, then, “the blues” name an existential focus/intent for this foray into embodied learning, awareness that I have described as “Mid-Section Blues.” Cone defines the “blues” as “secular spirituals” arising from a “state of mind in relation to the Truth of the black experience.” They are true because they “combine art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. They are an artistic response to the chaos of life.” Their origin and definition “cannot be understood independent of the suffering that black people endured in the context of white racism and hate.” The blues offer black people a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, nor being destroyed by it. They also give voice to “existence” as a “form of celebration. It is joy, love, and sex. It is hugging, kissing, and feeling. People cannot love physically and spiritually (the two cannot be separated!) until they have been up against the edge of life, experiencing the hurt and pain of existence.” The “blues” signal an unwillingness and inability “to follow white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” Ultimately, the “blues” express a belief that “one day things will not be like what they are today.”

“Mid-Section Blues” musings have arisen out of my state of mind in relation to the truth of my own embodied experience. Whatever truths may arrive come from art and life, poetry and experience, the symbolic and the real. Surprisingly, to me at least, this beginning writing-exploration speaks most powerfully with recognition of its deeply rooted self-loathing and decades of learned-imposed-imputed (self-)hatred in women’s embodiment, my own body. Nothing like systemic racism or white hatred of blackness, as per Cone, but vivid, costly, debilitating for me and those like me, who wrestle with physical form mired in shame, guilt, fear and more. I’m finding that these bodywork practices, these intermittent reflections along the way, seem to be paving a way to transcend trouble without ignoring it, without remaining captive to it. I’m finding unexpected moments of existence, from the core, as celebration, as an overflow of devotion/awareness from the wedded physical-spiritual life up against the self-loathing, the edge of existence known in hurts, pains, here in this place. The gift here for me is new ways to signal an unwillingness, an inability, to accept or follow any longer “white Christianity’s rejection of the body.” This line of learning, then, expresses my growing belief that one day, things will not be like what they are today.

I am already finding this to be true, in unexpected ways. For instance, I discovered while singing for a faith community recently that although I’ve not sung or practiced regularly for months, my vocal tone and range have cleared, extended. Huh? Specific attention to bodywork via brief yoga routine and continued training appears the only candidate for cause there. Singing flows out of the breath, aligned in body and posture. Yoga and training channel breath alongside energy currents within physical forms, posture.  Or another truth-awareness: simply taking an evening walk which can become boon for new awareness, gifted sentience of interdependence (see Eve’s Sermon).

But the significance is not the physical-biological cause-effect learning, that bodywork can renew or strengthen a singing voice, can open one’s heart to new sentience. I find those pleasurable, but not the rub of what impressed me, my body. The significant awareness for me today is that this fruit of sustained practice—expanded capacity in song, extended sentience—is/was completely unrelated to my state of mind and reasons for engaging the sustained practice. It’s like the mind functions for direct-sight dependent upon intention. Bodywork, “body-language,” in contrast, invites a peripheral life fundamentally necessary for, sustaining all seeing, only a portion of which we move to focus.

The bodywork path seems to be not solely to redress body-issues or self-loathing that remains rooted in my core, albeit in weakened form. Clearly that is one of the intentions, hopes, for this path of practice. But a more urgent of the emerging invitations appears to be an indirect pedagogy and surrender to a life-practice without clear awareness for the gains to be had, the ‘products’ to be ‘purchased’ in such activity. How often do we engage in a practice or activity or service for which we cannot precisely define its aim, its arguable end-point? How regularly do we submit to a commandment from ‘outside ourselves,’ minus some rationale for its completion? So it seems my path is to commit openness and resources, time and energies, to lively bodywork practices without knowing the end or outcome aimed. If the fruits so far are any clue, my intended aim/end will be ‘wrong' anyway, or at least inaccurate.

What will my life become, living into this primary commitment to embodied practices sustained with concrete resources, time-spent, openness to bodywork companions? What is it like to choose to unknown, from moment to moment, in order to learn the language of the body which is not literate or even a language. Perhaps its song instead?