When I was a child (a million years ago) there was a television commercial for aspirin. It showed a mother taking a stress break from her day by taking an aspirin and lying down on a cot in blissful serenity. Even then I knew that what she really needed was a break and the aspirin was the excuse to take one. Now I and everyone I know live in a world where stress is the norm. I can’t remember the last time I took a simple lie down in the middle of the day (as compared to a crash after overwhelm).
The most important questions seem to be: How do we get relief? and How do we support ourselves? We ask these questions all of the time, and spend lots of money on spas, yoga, meditation and self help. In the same way as early aspirin commercials, these are excuses for putting our feet up and taking ourselves offline (taking a break).
We don’t know how to take a break because we are unsupported to do so. Imagining a baby completely encircled by the protective and attentive arms of a parent is to imagine the amount of support one must feel to begin to breathe deeply and let go. When humans lived closer to nature, this effect could be gained by lying down under a tree and feeling the atmosphere of the tree encircling us with a kind of universal love. To have experienced in our lives this level of unconditional support gives us a skin memory, a skeletal memory of letting go. For most of us the ability to let go even to a tree is interrupted by lack of faith, sense of betrayal, fear of abandonment and aversion to touch.
How do we find relief as adults? We need to choose to allow another human being to be there for us in our pain and suffering. My old friend Jack Schwarz one of the early founders of holistic healing used to call our arms “jumper cables.” Today neuroscience with its discovery of “mirror neurons” shows us that our entire body is a resonance station for empathy with another person. This means re-learning empathy, which requires us to be able to feel another’s pain without taking it on as our own. It is the most powerful and natural ability of humans, and we have forgotten how to do it.
Our cultural emphasis on quick relief (from aspirin to self help) keeps us from trying this out – being the break for one another. What is the risk? The risk is we might learn that when our pain or suffering is heard by another with empathy, rather than solutions, we can have a new experience. This experience is called being met and it provides the difference between temporary relief from pain, compared to transforming our pain to a shared and beautiful experience of living.
Jay Tropianskaia, Director of Training
Copyright January 2018