Ron Kurtz, who created Hakomi therapy, tells a very funny story of how he first began, called ‘How I knew God wanted me to be a therapist.’ It’s the story of a time he got roped into doing a therapy session at a mental hospital, for which he was utterly unqualified. He was forced to completely wing it, and it all worked out remarkably well, in spite of everything he didn’t know about therapy.
I had an experience like this about five years ago. I was at home one day, struggling with a feeling of grief and loss that kept getting more and more intense. I had already done a lot of work with this, so I was feeling a great deal of hopelessness and despair. Then it dawned on me, in a moment, that something else was required. That night I was having dinner with four other women, good friends of mine, all of whom were coaches, therapists or counselors. I decided to ask them to do something with me that I had never done before.
After we had dinner, we sat down together. I asked them to support me in being fully present with my own experience, and allowing it to go wherever it wanted to. “I just want you to give me your full presence, that’s all,” I said to them.
“I don’t want you to figure anything out, or offer advice, or tell me what you think is going on. Don’t therapize me, don’t coach me—I’ve had enough of that. If you are completely in the moment, and something occurs to you spontaneously, then we can see how that feels… I’m quite suspicious about your capacity to not do what you normally do. Are you willing to try this?”
They agreed. So I sat down in front of them and began speaking from the place of deep grief. “I’m so sad about my family,” I said. “It just feels like too much to bear, this sadness.”
The four of them sat with me, being present, and unhelpful.
“I don’t want to carry this grief anymore,” I said. “I’d just like to die, and let it go. I don’t want to go on living with this.”
“Oh,” said one of the women, “Why don’t we make you a grave?” She said it like an innocent child, not like a professional. Her voice was light and playful, and my heart, mind and body all said ‘yes’ to that invitation.
So we made a grave for me, out of pillows, and chairs and blankets, just the way children build forts. I lay down in the grave, and pulled something over my eyes. The four women sat around the edges of my grave.
It was an incredible relief to lie down in it. As soon as I did, I felt my everyday identity fall away. I was in some other dimension. A vast space opened up, and I could feel the presence of other beings. Somehow I knew they were my ancestors. I could even hear one of them calling to me, from far back up my ancestral line. I realized immediately that the grief I was carrying was not all mine, that it had come down to me from a whole line of ancestors who had not known how to be with it.
As I lay there, in the dark and the quiet of my grave, I opened myself, as best as I could, to the experience of this grief, without a story or an explanation. It seemed to get very big and very heavy as I lay there. I told the women who were sitting with me that it felt like a huge mountain bearing down on me from above. I felt it was going to crush me—I could hardly breathe. My friends just sat there with me, silently. Not helping. Just being. I could feel their presence, even in the dark, under the mountain of grief.
Finally one of the women leaned just slightly into the grave. She was speaking very softly—her voice trembling a little. “I was just wondering,” she said, “if I could be right there, in the grief, with you. Would you let me in?”
I had this insight, in that moment. Not in my mind, but deep in my heart. I saw the nature of the impulse that had moved my friend to make that offer—it was so clear. It wasn’t coming from the mind or the ego; it was simply the movement of love, of non-separation. I could see she wasn’t trying to fix me, or comfort me, or heal me or help me. How could she be? She wasn’t a separate person in that moment. Love was just having its way with her, as it had with my other friend, when she said so innocently, “Let’s make you a grave.”
There was no way that I could say ‘no’ to her. So I said ‘yes’ and allowed her presence to come right into the core of all the grief. I had no reason for doing this—I wasn’t expecting anything to happen. But it did.
The mountain of grief, very slowly and gently, turned from a solid rock into a river. It was still grief, but now it was moving, flowing. It was the most beautiful feeling in the world. I was surprised, that the very same grief, once it began to flow, could feel like this. And I wasn’t sure at all, who was experiencing all of this, because my solid, separate identity was gone.
I didn’t need to know who I was, who my friend was. I lay there in the darkness, rejoicing in the flow of this sorrow. I realized that until I said yes to my friend, I was still trying to open to it alone. And at the same time I was resisting it, because it felt like too much. The simplicity of this was like light, filling my whole body. I could feel this gentle movement as the source of healing, the moment when we finally stop fighting and let life move in us.
I’m not suggesting that we start building graves for each other, or anything like that. That’s not how healing and evolution happen. We can’t take the flow of grace and make a formula out of it. In the tenderness of the unknown, when we are willing to face directly into the futility of everything we have tried, we can open to something radically new and different.
We may know, as I did, that we cannot develop if we are not willing to be where we are. But ‘knowing’ that, and really being able to stay present to the intensity of our experience is not the same thing.
So many of our ancient collective rituals for grief involve being together, releasing the psychic structures that hold us in isolation. It’s not easy to let ‘others’ into a place where we have been all alone for so long. It’s not something we learn once and then we are done with it. It’s a constant unlearning, an opening to a compassion that is much bigger than we are.
Practice
Not the high mountain monastery
I had hoped for, the real
face of my spiritual practice
is this:
the sweat that pearls on my cheek
when I tell you the truth, my silent
cry in the night when I think
I’m alone, the trembling
in my own hand as I reach out
through the years of overcoming
to touch what I had hoped
I would never need again.
– Kim Rosen
With much love and gratitude to my four sisters: Pat Quigley, Marg Newell, Jenie Taylor and Dienna Raye.
with love
Shayla
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