The World Day of Peace Message in 1990 was “Peace with God the Creator, Peace with all of Creation.”The World Day of Peace Message 2010 says: “If you want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation.” The message is clear and we, at Claret Center, want to be a part of cultivating World Peace.

We are “going green”!

With this issue of the “Winter Newsletter” we are launching an exciting new venture. You will receive this newsletter quarterly, and we believe they will be rich in content and meaningful to all of us who are on this journey to wholeness and Peace. Each newsletter will have a theme; in this issue the theme is “Connections” and the articles will relate to that theme.

Claret Center is celebrating its 30th anniversary of being a Center in Hyde Park. We have grown tremendously over the years and now are a staff of 20 - therapists, spiritual directors, massage therapist and a dance and movement therapist and our ever faithful, Lupe, the Administrative Assistant. We also have three internships – therapy, spiritual direction and diagnostic testing comprised of 16 people. These past thirty years have been wonderful years. We are grateful to the Claretian Missionaries for their support and we have appreciated the opportunity of companioning many of you on your life’s journey; we look forward to the future. You are always most welcome to call us with any questions, visit and join us in a cup of tea or avail yourself of our services.

At the bottom of this letter you will note that there is an opportunity to “unsubscribe” anytime you wish.

Blessings on all of you.

I am by nature a cautious person. Stories of my childhood include the tale of my one year old self learning to walk, every ounce of my one year old being determined to avoid the risk of falling. Today I do things that look adventuresome – snow skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, rollerblading, but I do them very carefully. Who knows what my defense system was distracted by the day I signed up for Argentine Tango, but it was a lucky mishap. It has taught me more than simply to dance and I am better for the experience.

As you watch a couple who dance tango well, it appears to be a beautiful, intricate and well practiced choreography. What is amazing is that tango, as danced in the salons of Buenos Aires, is improvisational. The intricate steps, beautifully coordinated movement and design is co-created by the couple in the moment. It is all about the embodied communication and connection of the partners. It is not too great a leap to find the connections to our interpersonal and work lives.

Jorge Luis Borges one of Argentina’s greatest writers reflects that “The tango can be debated and we have debates over it, but it still guards, as does all that is truthful, a secret”. Here are some of the secrets tango has revealed to me.

Secret #1: We long to be held tenderly and safely. That hardly seems much of a secret, but I believe that it is actually a carefully guarded secret. I am convinced that although many of us claim to be conflict avoidant or uncomfortable with anger, most of us are more comfortable with conflict than we are with our need and longing. Let’s try it out. Which can you better imagine yourself saying: ”I’m angry; please leave me alone” or “I’m lonely; I need you; Please hold me”. If you are lucky perhaps you are in relationships in which you are free to say both, but often our longing and need feel much too vulnerable, too weak or childish, even humiliating. But if you attend a milonga (Argentine tango dance party) and watch the peace and serenity on the faces of the dancers, it is evident that the tender embrace between two people is an essential component of the delight. Without a willingness to surrender to the embrace, the tango doesn’t happen. Argentine tango is very sensual (embodied) but it doesn’t carry the intense erotic energy of the tango stereotype. It has much more of the warm, tender embrace of dear friends, of parent and child, of sweet romance, and you are “forced to endure it” for an entire song. Is it any wonder that people throng to the milongas nightly … not only in Buenos Aires but in Chicago. In a stand back, keep your distance world, this is a come close opportunity. But the question that occurs for me is, what are we missing by ignoring, discouraging or denying this fundamental human need? What happens when people are deprived of the comfort and reassurance of warm, tender touch?

Secret #2: The Leaders Energy is in the legs, grounded, connected to the earth. In the dance, the leader provides a clear frame and is responsible for initiating the choreography. They must sense what foot the follower is on to know what steps are even possible. If this is communicated with a lead that is too strong or tight, the follower only has two options: to submit or resist. With a lead that is hard and controlling the follower feels stifled and limited, can’t move or be creative, can’t contribute to the design, and is pulled off balance. But if the leader is unclear or too weak in his/her lead, the follower often feels insecure and confused, might get left behind, can become anxious and rigid, can’t be creative, feels abandoned and might even feel angry and frustrated.

Leaders often feel vulnerable with the responsibility and expectations associated with the role. If the leader becomes anxious or shame-filled it can:

• contribute to a hard lead
• interfere with a connection with the follower
• contribute to a soft or ambiguous/confusing lead
• take him/her out of the present moment
• interfere with creativity and spontaneity

The parallels to other forms of leadership are almost too obvious to address. We sometimes deny the vulnerability of leadership but those who lead will most likely resonate with the challenges above and perhaps find some supportive wisdom.

Secret#3: The Follower’s Energy is light, in the chest, open
Since the follower is the role I most often dance in tango I will share my personal experience of that. Although I can say honestly that I unreservedly love the role of follower, learning to follow was one of the greatest challenges of my life. To follow, first you need to make the decision to follow, to give up the role, the power and responsibility of leading. Saying it is one thing, doing it another.
The follower needs to surrender all agendas and be in the moment without anticipating. She not only surrenders to the leader but surrenders to herself as well – to her need to be in control, to compete, to anticipate, to know. If the follower is not able to surrender, he/she remains rigid, heavily grounded. This results in a dance in which the leader must push the follower around the floor. The follower is also responsible for maintaining her own balance, being light in energy and strong in her core – not leaning too heavily on the leader, which would result in being dragged around the floor. If the follower is too passive and weak there is no resistance, energy or creativity to react to, to draw from; nothing to add to the collaboration. This is a complex and complicated role to do well

In the partnership, the follower makes possible the leader’s success by not blocking but creatively contributing to the design and execution. The role of follower requires the ability to wait, to trust the leader. It is an opportunity for me to let go of the anxiety and responsibility for the design, to focus on the connection and what I can add to the beauty of the dance. In a life where I often feel responsible and have taken up my share of leadership, this role is a joy.

Secret #4: Effective collaboration happens between two people who have a strong sense of their separateness and individuality. The first step in tango, even before the embrace, is a recognition of the separateness of the other. In this recognition of the other as separate, we develop the capacity for attunement and working out differences. We have all been part of a “collaboration” where there was really only one active person. A favorite tango video of mine is a beautiful, dramatic dance that starts in shadow. The tango begins slowly and sensually, progressing to dramatic dips and turns. It is only as the “couple” comes to the end of the dance that we realize that there is only one live person dancing with a life size puppet. There have not been two people contributing to the dance, maintaining their own balance, accommodating each others’ styles, gifts, abilities, preferences and limitations. There has been one person in control, completely determining the movement of the other. It is an easy “collaboration” for one person to be in control and the other simply to accommodate. Many of our collaborations, relationships and partnerships resemble this. The concrete results are not necessarily bad, they are just different and often not as interesting or satisfying as when two people collaborate and contribute their uniqueness.

In the intersubjective experience, the subjective worlds of two people interface and interpenetrate to create new meanings and patterns. Tango is perhaps the epitomy of collaboration, of intersubjectivity. In the different roles of leading and following, connecting in their separateness, surrendering to the differences, each contributes to the design. Ah yes … tango: risk and connection. What option do we have but to dance!

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Years ago while attending an international meeting I was struck by the ability of people to communicate across language barriers. One example stands out in memory. There was a young American woman who spoke only English who was working at trying to understand a young African woman who spoke French and her native language but not a word of English. Words failed them as they tried to elucidate their experiences to one another with gestures, pictures, grunts and groans, frustration and finally lots of laughter. They attempted to learn words in the other’s language, they watched facial expressions and body gestures and finally a newly arrived interpreter could help bridge the chasm of the difficult task of coming to understand the other. The experience was ended by the universal symbol of a bell announcing time for lunch. As I gathered my books and papers, I looked across the garden where we had been sitting to see the two young women continuing their conversation with moments of shared laughter, walking a few steps arms in arm, continuing the laughter, the gesturing and the facial expressions. Another participant came up behind me and looking across the garden in the same direction simply asked, “How did these two get to be such good friends, in such a short time because Liz does not speak a word of French and Cassilde does not speak a word of English?

Sometimes when we are trying to connect with one another it can seem as if we are trying to cross huge barriers such as the language one just mentioned. We desire to understand and to be understood and sometimes our words, gestures, facial expressions and images just don’t help. For me, it has always been a great challenge to bridge the language barrier and I have always lamented that others were so much better at doing it than I, myself. Yet, this is not the more common problem I experience in affirming my desire for connection with others.

I was reminded of a more problematic area in our human experience of connection by a recent conversation with my friend, Linda. As a rather timid and somewhat shy person, she has learned how to satisfactorily navigate the forming- connection task. She can show interest in others, listen to their experiences, let the other persons know that she understands. She can also share something of herself, then more of herself and little by little she feels connected to the other and so it is that she has many good, warm relationships. She accepts and feels accepted by many people.

Her greatest problem comes when the relationship has been challenged, when she disagrees, when she has hurt someone or has been hurt by another. The issue for her is one of reconnection after sometimes a subtle or not so subtle disconnect. Although her head has the intellectual “how – to’s” from having read many books and heard many talks on the subject, and yes, from even having given workshops on the topic, she still hesitates with all the power of her “frozen” stomach pit, to budge one inch in the direction of re-connection, even though it is reconnection she desires so strongly.

She suspects she is not alone in her quandary. It is so much easier to slowly move away from the person, remaining at a safe, protective distance. However, the truth is that at this “safe” distance, the connection, the real connection, has been lost.
She has made the journey back across the great divide. Not Easily! It seems to cost her something every time. She still needs to take the initial deep breath before starting the conversation, or participating in a conversation started by the other. The book by the Harvard Negotiation Team is well named: Difficult Conversations: How to Talk About What Matters Most, and we could add, to the people who matter most.

Years ago the Stone Center at Wellesley College began its research work in women’s studies and the well known book by Judith Jordan, Women’s Growth in Connection documented the place of connection in a woman’s development. Committed to research the place of connection in growth and development as well as healing and health, the work of the Stone Center today embraces the importance of connection in the developmental process for all human beings. Integral to the understanding of connection is the need to know how to re-connect when it is the reality of “disconnect” that describes the relationship.

I suspect that fundamental to the experience of connection is the experience of disruption and disconnect, and one of the most growthful things we can learn as human beings is how to find our way back to connection across the disconnect divide.

My final images about connection wander toward my friend, Jeanne Ellen, who currently struggles with the effects of metastatic lung cancer. As a student at CTU, she spent one summer working on a Hospice unit at Holy Cross Hospital on the south side of Chicago. One evening when she came home she told of her struggle to make a connection with an elderly man, dealing with the final stages of pancreatic cancer. He was no longer capable of speaking. As he lay in the bed before her he was restless, agitated and seemingly in considerable pain. She wanted to comfort him and instinctively knew that words were pretty much useless in this situation. She went blank as she tried to think of alternatives to reach him, to let him know that he was not alone in his pain. She prayed to herself and wondered about praying out loud with him, but even that did not seem to be able to make the bridge to his current condition. Then slowly, it came to her, she began to hum very softly, then a little louder. She hummed Amazing Grace. The tension in his body abated. He relaxed, the restlessness and agitation ceased and his body relaxed to the point that he was able, after a short while, to fall asleep.

Our power to connect with one another is truly awesome. Whether it be challenged by external barriers or internal ones, the gift to transcend what separates us is a growthful and humanizing experience.

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I feel close to you when you let your pain show. A protective shield inside me slides away. So often I didn’t even know it was there, not until I feel myself softening, my heart opening to you. In such a sacred moment, I feel a resonance with you in the vulnerable core of my being. I have allowed you deep inside. There, I quiver with you. It is the kind of closeness I treasure. I recognize the divinity of the moment. Pain has bonded us.

I know how pain feels, the searing tenderness, the helpless longing for relief. I remember the hell of being alone with it, cursed to suffer all by myself. I had no hope of relief, no knowledge on how to let it pass. As a child I saw my mom, overwhelmed with her distress, whatever it was about. I had no idea. I saw my dad, stoically insensitive to pain, not just his own. He also seemed indifferent to the pain of others, especially when he chose to cause it. I was always alone with my pain, trying not to feel it, trying not to let it show.

I remember the moment in my own healing journey, when it seemed clear as broken glass to me, that the worst thing about pain was being alone with it. And so I began to experiment with feeling and sharing my own pain. I noticed again and again how deeply connected I felt with anyone willing to metaphorically – or actually – hold me in my pain. For years I had already often remarked on how closely connected I felt with anyone who was sharing their pain. My understanding of intimacy grew out of these experiences. I describe intimacy as “tenderly shared vulnerability”. It is sharing the experience or the possibility of pain that draws us into sacred space with each other.

Perhaps, antithetically, the tragic gulf that isolates people, one from another, is the fear of pain. If I let myself feel it, I’ll be lost in it forever. If you’re in pain and I let myself near you, my own pain will thaw, and I’ll have to feel it. If I’m in pain, and I let you near, you may end up hurting me even more deeply. When one or the other of us is in pain, moving closer is a risk. It seems easier to keep a safe distance. And so, there I sit, tucked away inside my shell, never to be hurt again, forever alone with the pain I cannot let go. At least I’m not feeling it.

The risk to choose connection in the pain may be essential to the healing journey. It could be that only in the arms of the beloved can I let go of my pain.

My first discovery of the healing power in the arms of compassion came when my daughter was an infant. I remember the moment. Amanda was wailing. When I picked her up, her body was writhing in tension. She continued to wail. I held her softly, receiving her distress. And then, suddenly, the magic happened. She let go. Her pain passed. She melted into my arms, completely at peace. No tension. No pain.

Again and again it happened throughout her childhood. The blast of distress filled tension led to the comforting arms, and resulted in the softening that eased the pain. I have come to believe that softening into the comfort that releases the pain is an archetypal human experience. It is natural to every one of us. In my experience, even when the “softening reflex” has been unlearned through being too much alone in pain, it can be relearned.

In my early thirties I went through a whole year where I was taking pain killers and decongestants every day to ward off crushing headaches. Then I read about headaches and muscle tension. It suddenly hit me that I was dramatically increasing my own pain by tightening up against it. I had forgotten how to relax, to soften my muscles, and let painful tension pass. And so I began a year of weekly therapeutic massage. I discovered that my skin hunger was directly connected to my lost ability to deeply relax. The touch of another’s hands showed me how to let go of my tension.

I stopped taking painkillers when I started massage. For many years thereafter, I did not use painkillers. Whenever, wherever I was experiencing pain, I breathed and let my awareness into the pain, inviting it to soften, radiate, and flow away. Twenty years later my ability to soften and radiate was profoundly tested during a heart attack. I breathed softly, fully aware of the supernova of pain radiating outward from my chest. The emergency room doctors weren’t convinced I was having a heart attack because my blood pressure did not spike. I got through the heart attack without damage to my heart. I believe this happened because I did not tighten up against the intense release of pain.

Massage and the lesson of physical softening was only the beginning of my journey with pain. Before long it became clear to me that I had extremely deep layers of tension where I was holding untold distress. And so I began body-oriented psychotherapy, steadily learning how to deepen the softening, so that awareness could return to the places where I’d stored so much pain. I found my way back to my feelings. This was a journey I could never have made alone. Michele provided the compassionate arms. I learned to soften into them. I came to understand pain as the felt experience of the need to let go.

One profound moment of the journey stands out in my memory. I had been learning to soften into feeling and releasing the pain in my own sadness. At this time I went to one of the most pain-filled funerals I will ever experience. The twenty one year old son of a dear friend had been suddenly killed in a car accident. People were openly crying on and off throughout the service. I sobbed the entire time. I had finally found a place where it really was OK to let out my pain. I was in complete solidarity with everyone there. We were all in pain. It made us one. It gave us release.

At Claret Center we provide a place of comforting connection for anyone in pain. Our massage therapist and movement therapist are able to be present to your body in a way that invites you to release your tension. Our therapists know how to provide an emotional safety that invites you to soften into feeling whatever you’ve disallowed. Our spiritual directors are able to companion you through the painful darkness that brings you to new life. We believe pain connects us all. We are here to be with you as you learn to let go.

SOFTENING
An exercise in Emotional Discipline

SOFT BREATH:
Spend a little time becoming conscious of the space within your body. Begin with a simple body scan, starting with your feet. Notice places that are tense, in pain (discomfort), or numb (lacking awareness). Connect the flow of your breath so that you are noticing ever more clearly where the tension, pain, or lack of feeling lies.
Choose one particular internal location upon which to focus awareness. Continue following your breath and noticing what the energy is like in the area of concern. Simply notice whatever you notice. Don't try to change anything.
While maintaining awareness around the area of concern, begin to slowly and steadily allow your breathing to deepen. Let the soft flow of your breath brush up against the edges of the tension or pain. Allow the softness of your breath to flow all around the area. Do not try to make anything happen. Simply allow breath to flow softly where it may.

SANCTUARY:
Stay with your breath, allowing the softening to continue, even as you let an image of a safe place come to you. Visualize yourself in a place that is entirely yours, that you can now make just as you need it to be, so that you can be perfectly safe there. Make it so the time of day, the season of the year, the quality of your surroundings, the sights and sounds are just right for you at this moment. You are giving yourself a wonderfully comforting place to be with your pain. Return now to allowing your breath to gradually soften the inner place where your pain is held.

HEALER:
When you are ready, begin to imagine that a Healer is coming to join you, someone with whom you can continue to feel completely safe. This person is someone strong enough, wise enough, and loving enough to be able to be with you in just the way that you need. Allow the Healer to be present to you in the way that perfectly helps you to soften completely as you breathe through feeling the pain. Let your body mold into whatever is supporting you. Each time you breathe out, choose to soften and let go ever more completely. Your pain is steadily passing.

Note: This is one of many exercises that Allan has developed. More are available in his workshop, Emotional Discipline, and in the follow up group that meets on Mondays.

WAYS OF AVOIDING PAIN

HOSTILITY: INFLICT PAIN (“Its under my control...”)

• THREAT: expression of the intent to inflict pain.
• ABUSE: the insensitive infliction of emotional or physical pain.
• RIDICULE: exposing flaws in an attempt to painfully humiliate another.
• REVENGE: abuse as a way to get even with someone perceived as an actual or possible source of pain.
• BLAMING: the pain is your fault, not mine!

PASSIVE AGGRESSION: indirectly causing another pain as a form of payback.

• DEPRESSION: INGEST PAIN ("I’m at its mercy . . .”)
• VICTIM (POOR ME): helpless identification with relentless suffering.
• SHAME: the judgment of myself as unworthy of love, deserving pain.
• GUILT: unreasonably holding myself responsible for the pain of another.
• WITHDRAWAL: disconnecting from another to avoid feeling pain.
• TOUGHNESS / INSENSITIVITY: the refusal to be affected by pain.
• WORRY: anxiously obsessing over the pain that may be around the corner.
• ADDICTION / SELF-SABOTAGE: engaging in self-defeating behavior that brings more pain.

If you find yourself stuck in any of the above behavioral patterns, working with one of therapists may be helpful.

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