Surfing the Waves of Undulating Grief

by Shelly Crane

As I sit here starting to write this post, it’s almost 2 weeks since the death of my brother-in-law, Dan, who died tragically in a car accident. Dan would have been 40 years old this June.  Time during these last few weeks has been hard to grasp. My husband left to be with his sister, Emma, within hours of the accident and has been with her since. I followed him out several days later and now have come back home to return to work. I have been moving as though through a fog. To and from work, booking plane tickets within hours of the flight, changing tickets, rearranging schedules, getting to and from the airport, and asking for help in so many different ways from colleagues and family and friends and neighbors. 

In the first week, there truly were no words. There was just presence and holding and tears. That, and struggling to do all of the ruthlessly time-bound things that need to be done in the aftermath of a death. If it wasn’t so heartless, it would be laughable. Calls, so many phone calls, to the medical examiner, the police, the funeral home, employers, HR, friends, family, and forms, and emails, and finding passwords and pins and usernames. 

The undulating waves of grief rolling over and through all of us, as we try to hold Emma, close enough so that she is not swept away beneath them. All I can think about is how we are born to do this. The way that everything else gets so quiet, it falls away in layers - it just doesn’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is staying close, holding, breathing, attending to our grief.

As Jeanne has said many times, a good death is a community making event. And I can feel that now. From the terrifying moment Emma found out something had happened to Dan, she has been enveloped in love and support from her community. They have extended their love to her family and to Dan’s. They are holding space for her tears and her laughter, the memories they shared, and for the paralyzing grief about the long lives together that they will no longer share. They are holding each other in their grief. They are helping with all of the relentless needs that do not go away just because the world has turned inside out – cooking, laundry, groceries, and so much more. 

What I have been reflecting on now is my deep gratitude for my experiences in SoULL in learning how to support a person in active distress. To know that I don't need to hold my own tears back (and that allowing myself to be touched by her grief is the healing for both of us), to make eye contact and not shy away from seeing the grief, the comfort I feel with just sitting and BEING and knowing in my body that THAT is the medicine. The understanding of behavioral patterns and defenses and the deep compassion I feel for the defenses that are going to arise in a tragedy like this. The trust that I now feel that not only will we survive, but that this tragedy is bringing all of us into a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves and how our lives are intricately interwoven into each others’.  And not feeling guilty or surprised by the oscillating love and joy and grief that at times can feel ecstatic in the midst of such a confusing situation.

There is much grieving yet to do, and so much support that Emma will need as she begins to build a life without her person. And there has been so much love and gratitude that is flowing. So much to give and to receive. And I am so grateful to SoULL for the ways in which I have been learning to be open to it all, to move in and out the grief and the love and the frustration and the exhaustion with some degree of fluidity.

What Goes Around Comes Around

What Goes Around Comes Around

by Dr. Mark Brady

“Soul-knowing is a fountainhead from within you moving out. Drink from there!”

Years ago I transferred out of a well-regarded PhD program at UCLA in favor of attending and graduating from this small startup school. It was founded by two male college graduates, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, who believed they only got 1/2 their brain (the left) and little of their heart educated. Their school would be different – it would be designed and intended to educate the right brain and the heart as much as possible.

One of my students in those days was an impressive mother of four kids who also worked as a civil engineer. She specialized in the design and restoration of movable bridges – the kind that rise up or swivel round to allow waterway traffic flow. She also worked as a birth doula and . . . a death doula in her spare time. Since I was a builder, had just fathered a child of my own and had been researching, writing and teaching about death for many years, Jeanne and I hit it off. I eventually became first her mentor and then her colleague. She ended up researching and writing an award-winning thesis (measuring heart variability resonance in bedside sitters with the dying). She went on to talk about that research to various groups who received it, and her, with open kindness and appreciative applause. I personally witnessed a group of retired, curmudgeonly Stanford professors receiving her talk with surprising warmth and appreciation.

Joining Whole Brain to Whole Heart

After I got my right brain educated at Sofia, I spent the next ten years tuning up my left brain at a Stanford Think Tank hanging out with Nobel Laureates and MacArthur geniuses – as a cultural anthropologist disguised as the maintenance man. Kind of like my own strange version of Good Will Hunting, I suppose. I learned many things over those ten years (I’ll share three of the most significant takeaways from that decade in an upcoming post).

Currently, I am enrolled at another small startup school. It’s a school conceived and birthed with mostly female energy, primarily designed for adults who have gone through traditional education. The school grew out of Jeanne’s interest and experience with birth, death, somatic psychology and engineering. And, things that exist before, during and after those things. Things known and unknown. Things seen and unseen. Things sensed and not sensed. It’s a refreshing School of Unusual Life Learning (Although I’m not a fan of naming any learning organization a “school” since Ken Robinson informed 76 million people of the many ways that modern schools kill creativity – people judge you by the circles you travel in).

I’m currently finding SoULL to be anything but a creativity-killer. In fact, simultaneously, along with my recent enrollment as a student, I’m just about finished with first drafts of my fourth screenplay (The Muffin-Truckin’ Change Agency; The Levamine Conspiracy; Triumph of the Intransigents and The Winner); I’ve created and taught extremely well-received seminars on Social Safety Science (Polyvagal Theory) and Artificial Intelligence and I’ve researched and written first drafts of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of curriculum for a course in Embodied Altruism and . . . all while pretty much keeping up with my weekly blog-writing.

Rounding the Circle

It’s difficult to clearly and compellingly speak about numinous, expansive, healing, learning experiences. If you’re at all interested and resonate with such things, a startup School of Unusual Life Learning may indeed have some appeal. You can find out more by visiting: SoULL.

Mark Brady, Ph.D. is a transpersonal neurobiologist and a neuroscience and creativity educator. Dr. Brady also writes regularly on his own blog site, The Flowering Brain (https://thefloweringbrain.wordpress.com/) .

Becoming a "Whole Life Doula"....And Being on the Alien Landscape with someone.

“We are defining a new, and also very old, kind of care: watching, cultivating and fostering the force of life itself. It is a somatic therapy because Doulas are always aware of the body and using tools to help “Life” (and energy) move through it.”

Becoming a “Whole Life Doula”

…And Being on the “Alien Landscape” with Someone.  

By Jeanne Denney

Two weeks ago something really important happened in SoULL, and maybe (who knows) the world. We started our first cohort of students in our third (and last) year of training. They will be our first graduates. They will become what we are calling Whole Life Doulas. It has taken a long time to get here, so I can’t tell you how gratifying it has felt to start. As far as I know, we are the first folks to use the term Doula for Whole Life, and mean really…ALL of it. So I want to explain a little about what we are doing. Why we are doing it may come in another blog. But I am slowly putting this together, and I would like to take you with me.

Back in 2014 when I was teaching students in the Art of Dying about presence, I created a visualization about the power of presence with hospice patients.  I had witnessed a lot of different ways of “being with” patients through their journeys through illness, some better than others. I wanted my students to sense what our medical system feels like when people are vulnerable and overwhelmed, what it is like to be dropped during the vulnerable meeting with mortality.  In our culture, it usually feels like…a very alien, lonely landscape. I wanted them to feel into what helps there.

What I did not realize then was that this exploration would have, nested within it, almost all of the processes we are learning now in SoULL to be what we are calling a “Whole Life Doula.”  It could not be a more complete picture of how we are trying to help students learn to be with someone on their “alien landscape,” and the various ways of helping.  

There are many, many, many new and alien landscapes in a human life. These are places we feel lost, confused, disoriented, alone, and may not know the language or customs.  To come of age, to become a parent, to find your first job or overcome a heartbreak, to lose a spouse, to retire after many years of feeling you knew exactly who you were, to move to a new town, to have an empty nest after 25 years of parenting, to be betrayed, to get a bad diagnosis, to fail out of school, to lose a limb, your house or your youthful beauty.  To even be overwhelmed by the demands of success! The list of unannounced changes we encounter in the changes of human life is endless.  They all come with that familiar feeling of disorientation.

We start with the idea that human beings in moments of great change and disorientation look for, and need, companionship.  A companion is not someone who is necessarily more oriented or aware than they are, but they are at least a person who is “in it” with them, and with whom they exchange energy, ideas, resources and experiences. Skillful “helping” and companioning certainly starts with presence.  We have been exploring what that word means in some detail. 

Despite the variety of changes we can encounter in life, there are definitely themes and patterns we can learn to recognize in life change, just as in birth and death.  I believe that this is because our ever changing human bodies have very similar organic and even organismic patterning (meaning they are a result of our bodies way of changing). It is really good to learn to recognize this. It helps us help.

When we add this body orientation to the terrain of change and find a map, something changes further: we can find direction to move out of freeze and confusion.  We can also begin to see where one piece is with respect to another and where we are with respect to where we came from.  When we add someone with experience on the terrain with us, it changes again.  When we add the wisdom to see patterns, it changes again.  And finally, when we add continuity of companionship, staying with another person, helping them find the meaning of their journey, it changes again. 

A Doula is not a coach. That feels too goal oriented and egoic. A Doula is not a psychotherapist. Those words do not hold the deep essence of the “ordinariness” in doula care. We are defining a new, and also very old, kind of care: watching, cultivating and fostering the force of life itself. It is a somatic therapy because Doulas are always aware of the body and using tools to help “Life” move through it. Why should this approach be confined only to birth and death, when we are birthing and dying all of the time?

So today I want to just share 6 pillars of Whole Life Doula Care we are working with. It is where we are starting to define this care. Here they are:

• Presence,

• Orientation,

• Know-How,

• Wisdom, 

• Support for Making Meaning,

• Continuity of Care through a process.  

I would love to have your feedback. What do YOU want in a companion? Why? If we have left something out…please let us know. Because the evolution of the idea of a Whole Life Doula isn’t going to be one person’s idea. It will come from a community of people working on it organically, and together. You are invited.

Oh, and if you would like to do the “Alien Landscape” contemplation?… It is below. Enjoy imagining someone next to you. Or not.

__________

The Alien Landscape Visualization:

Imagine you are lost in an alien and threatening landscape you did not anticipate, one you have never prepared for and whose language and rules you don’t understand.  It could be a jungle, a dark woods, the mountains, a dessert, a dingy at sea, space.  Let your mind go to one survivalist landscape that comes to mind.   Imagine that you are alone.  

What kinds of things do you feel?  And what do you most long for?  

Now Imagine how you would feel if you were in this same situation if you encounter someone else on your path, a companion appears suddenly.  Feel what that alone might mean.  Consider how sensitive you are to this other person.  

What are the qualities that you would most want in a companion and NOT want in this situation? 

Now imagine that your companion has a map of this terrain.  How does that change how you feel?

Now imagine that your companion has both a map and has had other experiences with this terrain and is not afraid.  Perhaps he or she has even taken other people through it.  How does this change your experience?

Now imagine that not only does the companion have a map and some experience, but he or she can read the signs of the natural landscape:  the weather, animal behavior, smells, like indigenous people do.  He or she knows what to eat and how to survive in a natural landscape.  How does THIS change your experience?  

Finally imagine that this guide has a sense (which you don’t) that this experience has a deep significance or meaning to you, something like an initiation, and is present with you, finding meaning in the task of being with you and honoring the importance of this experience to a larger self.  They are not there to help you get out of it, but to get into it, as transformation of the highest level.  Something that possibly your whole life has led you to.  He or she may not know the meaning, but they are trained to help you find it as you work through the challenges that come.  

 How does having this kind of person with you change your experience?   And what qualities would you want in this kind of person?

One last scenario to explore…. that you have a person with you who takes over your journey,  promises to be a hero with special powers, takes charge, and then one day when the going is hardest, you are weak and you and they are not sure that you will make home or can be saved…they leave you.   How do you feel?   How is this different than the experience we just explored.  

New Reflection

by Rebecca Cooper Lazaroff | 1/3/24

One day last summer I was on a hike that I regularly go on, and found myself noticing the changes: what had come and what had gone.

Where a trickling stream had been, was now a thick, mucky bed, and the woods that had thinned over winter were now dense with rich, green foliage. And then around a familiar bend, I came across a stretch of purple blossoms. I had never seen them before and had I not come upon them just then, I might not have known they existed at all.

But I guessed that The Life of the Forest knew. Likely the birds, insects and small creatures who made home or use of the flowers in some way, they all knew. And we all knew, at some point a change in weather would set off a chain reaction and the flowers would begin to die. Or, maybe it would be another event: depleted soil, a thick strangling vine, or too many hungry insects. Whatever the catalyst and conditions, the flowers would eventually stop blooming, the leaves would curl, and the life pulsing through the stems would contract back into the roots and soil.

I laughed to myself thinking, if you dropped in from another planet and didn’t know better, you might see the blooms die and think, “Well, that’s it. They’re gone now. The end.” And when the small purple flowers bloomed again next summer, would you just sense somehow the life and death of the last flowers had fed the new ones? I’ve come to think of my own life like that, as a garden. An organic, evolving consciousness on a continuum. Each season feeding the next.

It’s January again and the mountain ridge near where I live has a particular glow in the morning light on a clear day at this time of year. I thought if I were to recreate it, I might use an underpaint of sunrise tangerine and mix a purply-brown to fill in all the hibernating trees across it. There is so much radiance in its stillness.

Just days ago, I was in the dwindling energy of 2023. The various threads of my life I’d worked so hard to cultivate last year were losing focus and form as I turned my attention to the New Year, largely based on what did or didn’t happen the past year, or years. But, what’s really new about it? My life last year is the very reason I stand here as I am this year: strong, tired, vibrant, sad, ready and/or reluctant. What’s alive and what I’ve let go of has created the very soil I can’t help but grow from this year.

So, I wonder if I can be like the sunrise on the mountains, still, radiant and resting as I prepare to grow. And I wonder about the word New as I become more curious about using words like Now and Next. Who am I Now because of how and what I’ve lived and what’s Next? Where does my life force want to go?

Rebecca is a student of SoULL and beautiful writer. Many thanks, Rebecca, for this piece!

My First Blog

I’ve been asked to blog.  What is a blog?  I had to look it up.  What is my purpose for writing a blog? What kind of blog do I write?  What do I write about?

Well, for me, exposing myself with ink and paper is an “edge” for me. I’d like to write about what it means to be “at or on my edge”.  For the last few years,  I have been working to build a school.  Not just any school; but, a school called the “School of Unusual Life Learning”, aka; “SoULL”.  Not your ordinary mainstream school!  Doing something that’s not mainstream is not unfamiliar to me (if you knew how I grew up!). But teaming up with SoULL’s founder, Jeanne Denney, in developing every inch of the walls of this holistic school, is.

I have loved and been inspired by my colleague’s material.  It has definitely enhanced my life from one filled with fear and living in the shadows…. of well…”larger energies”, to one where I just say “Yes” to almost anything I want to do. 

 So, I have said “yes” to developing marketing.  So, I researched ‘how to market’.  I have said “yes” to writing a newsletter.  I’ve tried my hand at this technology…well… let’s just say I need more practice.  

I have said ‘yes’ to fundraising and raised a little over $5000.00 last year with my first try.  This year I will try again..

I said “yes” to teaching. Now, I’m a teacher.  I have said “yes” to being a board member, a treasurer, and an assistant director!  I have said “yes” to bringing in new students, to advertising, to social media and even to doing a live event on Facebook!

And!.…we have grown over the last 2 years.  We have been successful.  I have been successful.  I have grown and expanded in ways I am still figuring out.  Sometimes it hurts!  I have learned that I have a strong desire to make something great happen that will inspire and free people from hiding their truest self.  I like to see things through.  I have a strong passion and like for people to believe me and that what I am telling them is something that will benefit and heal their lives.  

All of this has had me experience my edge constantly over the last 2 years.  The place where stepping back would be comfortable, familiar, safe and easy versus stepping forward which means uncertainty, hard work, and work I have never imagined or thought I had the capacity to do.

Where does my fear lie? Does it lie in stepping back and never fully living and witnessing my own transformations? Or in stepping forward, with everything in me shaking, curious to see what comes?  

What is your edge?  How far are you willing to go for yourself?  What holds you back?  How hard are you willing to work for a dream or desire you now believe can’t happen?

Well… life being a series of waves that go up and down, in and out, forward and back offers us infinite opportunities to create new possibilities, or… stay the same... stay safe.

I have watched students explore with wonder over some new revelation they may have intellectually always known, but not felt through every cell in their body.  I have seen them go to their depths of personal history and then dance with complete abandon over their new found freedom!

All the way through this journey, I have often questioned myself, doubted myself, and yet the next due date came, the next semester, the next year, and I keep saying ‘yes’.  Being on your edge means all this happens and still; I am calling myself forward to meet the next new challenge.  

Then, comes a time when I look and see all that has been established and implemented and I realize - that I have been a big part in laying the foundation and the growth of this school.  It has been through my experience as a student, an assistant, a teacher, and an assistant director that I have learned about having a life that includes death in it, that has brought my courage, my strength and my gifts forward.  My longing to come forward and not hide  empowers my life force.  I can fail and still say “I did it”!

They say you “have to die into it’ when forging into the uncertainty in order to rise up.  This means leaving behind all the reasons to say no, leaving aside the self doubt and the negative self talk in order to see what can be.  I continue to move “my edge” further out and can continue to meet it, rise with it, get stuck, or leap forward.  The choice is mine.

                  Once you understand you have roots,  

   You can let go, 

                                  And trust….

Ok. So this is my first attempt at writing a blog,  it is, as I acknowledged earlier, an edge for me.  What do you think would be an edge for you?

You can dare write it,  or not…..

Andrea Pollak,

Assistant Director

The Marvelous Human Excess of "New Year"

January 1, 2023

This morning I find myself pondering the strange, and wonderful worldwide phenomenon of celebrating "A New Year" (whenever it is). This human thing that we do in most every culture fascinates me more as I age, not less.

In one way this projection on time and the sun of something ending and something else beginning is kind of arbitrary, and…weird. We create a numbering system, and a calendar, then celebrate its repetition as if it is real?

And yet every New Year's Eve and Day I feel something. A moment to honor and release trials, maybe. A small place to make space for my longing and wishes for this life. However arbirary it may seem and whenever it happens, it is a birth/death ritual. AKA a celebration of life that fills some human need to practice the movement of our lives into possibility. To mourn, to hope, to pray, to visualize, to honor, to thank, acknowledging that we are being moved day to day, month to month, year to year. Together.

Humans fill these days with ridiculous and wonderful and corny things. In a way it puts our absurdity on full display. Hats and hooters? A ball on Times Square that drops (?!?!). In Colombia (where I was last year), there were all kinds of rituals: eating a grape and making a wish for every month. Running around the block with a suitcase at midnight if you want to travel in the year. Wearing different color underwear for different wishes (money, love etc). The picture above is my granddaughter Oli in Colombia joining the awesome festivities for the first time. I mean we are a rather ridiculous species, but also a wonderfully hopeful and creative one. And maybe indulging our imagination in ritual changes things.

In some cultures the New Year is very sacred. I can remember in 1980, seeing the Zen monks on TV in Japan striking the huge gongs and feeling the chill of it. Still, severe and deep as it was, it was also the theater of an arbitrary, ordinary moment.

For me, my pen and my journal, as well as fire and water have been wonderful companions for the annual moment. When I lived in New York we had a stream and a fire pit by our house. Fires, guitars, singing with neighbors, champagne and the lighting of little walnut boats for the water were part of our rituals. As I age, sometimes I meditate alone, or create something with others to support and celebrate our shared journey. I really love this created island where I can feel my gratitude and renew my faith in life.

This year we are waiting for the birth of a new family member who is LITERALLY due to be born on the New Year's Eve (still waiting but any minute). I am sure that she will carry this felt, worldwide, expectant and hopeful energy forever as part of her journey.

Wherever you are, however and whenever you do it, may you find another one or two, in body or in spirit, to say thank you to, and to renew the life that is within you. It is some strange birthright to do this. And we all share it.

Sharing an old poem below. And so many blessings for 2023

A new year comes

The vessel of longing is cracked against the side of a new ship

like every moment, really

but this one we agree to call

Different.

Suppose for one moment

there are no more births

only this one cup,

this one unfolding

spinning like a lost planet burning itself into light.

This one present where the past

and the future

rushing together from opposite directions

Collide,

forming the body and bone that is you.

Bring your full or broken cups

to this altar of creation

Speak,

Sing your praises.

 by Jeanne Denney

SoULL in the Public School: A Student Project by Jackie Kelly

By Jackie Kelly

In 2019 I enrolled in graduate school for social work after 5 years in a corporate environment and one year of SoULL. That fall, while in Year 2 of SoULL, I interned at a middle school counseling students from the ages of 10-12. SoULL teachings guided my work, enabling me to see and connect to these young human beings. This was in part due to my “teaching assistants”: the plants that I had in my office.

During most sessions, I would ask my students to water the plants. We spoke about life, growth and the energy within all living things. For example, one student was processing the recent death of his aunt and his fear of death. I spoke about the energy that goes into creating the plant that helps it grow, but also what happens after it blooms. We traced the energy moving back into the earth. I helped him see how this is a natural life process, which prompted further questions of death and dying. He asked if it’s the same flower that blooms the following spring. Instead of answering him, I asked what he thought. He said he thought it was the same or at least part of them was in the soil. We then went on to discuss his aunt and process what he wanted to say to her. He expressed creatively through drawing, and left it underneath one of the plants in my room. This is just one example of how SoULL teachings assisted my students in learning and healing.

In March of 2020, when COVID-19 forced the world to shutdown, my time counseling came to an abrupt end. There was no time to process the changes with my students or say goodbye. I was heartbroken. Though the situation was beyond anyone’s control, I felt I had failed them. It felt like a death to me. Ultimately, I recognized that I was grieving our loss of connection, and needed space to process our ending. These kids had so bravely opened up to me about their lives. They taught me how to sit with others who are struggling and in pain. It was truly an exchange. I consider them some of my greatest teachers.

SoULL taught me that a relationship doesn’t disappear when people aren’t in each other’s presence. I had also learned that while we may not always get the ending we want, we can still be empowered to have a good ending, even after a bad one. Continuing the flow of energy between people in relationships, instead of cutting off, we may find it isn’t an ending after all.

I decided to process my experience with each of my students on my own by writing them each a letter reviewing the work we had done, and expressing what they had taught me. I shared my view of them, recalled their strengths, dreams, and hopes for the future. Once all the letters were completed, I went through each and read it to them as if they were sitting in front me. I sensed an immediate grounding and settling in my body. I believe that they heard me on some level.

These teachings guided me both in working with students and grappling with the after effects of an abrupt and unexpected shift in relationships with my students. I am forever grateful that I was able to process all of the work and connection experienced throughout the school year.

Banner image by Gryffyn M. on Unsplash, featured images courtesy of Jackie Kelly and Haverstraw Elementary

Becoming a Whole Life Doula

When I started to teach SoULL material back in 2014, I did not actually know what these teachings would do for people.  I just knew I had received it, and if I did not get it out of myself I might self-combust.  That was motivation enough to start teaching!  By 2017 I gathered a few students and tried to teach it. I had as much curiosity as they had.   Would anyone else understand it? Would it have an effect? Now I know a whole lot more.  I know that the teacing provides helpers and healers a powerful and unique lens for people to see life.  It has expanded awareness, comfortability with others in crisis, with students’ own life processes, and their capacity to be present.   That was pretty great.   

By last fall the leadership group wanted to do more.  We wanted to help train new helping professionals. We had the theory, somatic principles, experience and techniques to support with the picture of whole life.  We knew how to do it.  There was just one problem.  What would our students call themselves?  What would we train them to offer?

Would we be training somatic therapists?  Yes.  In a way (…but “therapy” has a long history of struggle with academics, psychoanalysists, the politics of accredation and medical insurance).   Would we be training coaches (as in life coaches)?  Yes in a way (…but “coaching” was so goal oriented).   Would we use the word “practitioner”?  Kind of cold and clinical.  All three ideas were, frankly, felt very masculine and from a model we hoped to change. We hoped to describe something simpler, more organic, more human, and possibly more traditionally feminine.  Then we remembered the word Doula.

Such a simple and beautiful idea.  Doula. The one who serves to support great life transitions. One who sits at bedsides, who holds the hand, bringing know-how, clarity, tools, calm, support and deep observation.   One who holds a container. Importantly, a doula also holds a map of life transition, even as she supports freedom of choice and agency.

To date this word “Doula” had been used mainly for birth and more recently death.  I have been both a birth and death doula myself. These experiences gave me some of my own greatest teaching. But I was also a body centered (somatic) therapist, helping people in ALL kinds of transitions: coming of age, retirement, parenting, adolescence, early work lives, mating, marriage… They followed the same clear principles.

I saw an opportunity to help natural healers of any kind support other people in any of the birth/death process of life. We would use whole life somatic principles, the gifts of nature, the art of presence, and the tools of practical support.    Because the life force itself can be understood and supported. Because there are so many births and deaths in life. A “Whole Life Doula” is an expansion of a more limited doula idea (ONE process), but its central tennant is active in all of these processes, and they can be learned.

Learning to support and guide the soul and psyche through the life span can't be a short course. It isn't. We support people in a community setting over three years, or 400 hours of training. We help real healers and creatives give genuine, heartful service to life processes. Not just the one. The many.

These understandings are everyone’s birthright, but have most often been received and carried by women. Does it need to be said that this knowledge is of the deep feminine? Women are the main participants in SoULL so far, but I want to say loudly: this is not just for women. Men and folks of any gender: Please come on in! We so need you to learn this language and be advocates. This is different than the authority based, corporate care of the medical and social work systems. It springs from a different way of being.

Ironically, years ago I wrote a poem (below) for one of my therapists who happened to be male.  I did not know that I was describing what I would train students to do one day.  I did not see it coming.  Maybe this poem still says it best. Isn’t this holding so much of what we long for personally? And isn’t this the perspective we will need to learn to renew life on earth?  I hope some of you seek and find these skills. Because life is too short not to give your gifts, or find a map with true North on it.

The Doula

At first you only watch for the movements of the busy physician

until you notice the silent presence near you 

at the pivot of the spinning room

and your eyes that keep retreating there

He was like this.  Like a large bosomed widow sitting at the bedside nodding

or gazing placidly at the broad knuckles of her folded hands  

Within the prayers of this kind of church woman

there is an old voice humming a song that has never become common 

If you are lucky, one sits by your bedside 

holding the rare vessel of acceptance 

within your labor, your illness, your birth

your dying

folding your song of suffering indifferently into pleats 

of a great black dress 

or her apron with pockets

always made from the same pattern

If you call out, sometimes you find one there

forgiving your painful body of stories with a vacant focus,

because she has always known your family line

and it is not different now

than it ever has been

Here, I have a wish for you:

May one of these sit with you too in those long hours that come

during the mourning of your next beginning

-Jeanne Denney

Cover image by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

Energy of Life

By Kim Ladd

My name is Kim Ladd. I am a SoULL student and a registered nurse in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in Chicago. I work in a world of monitors, alarms, lights, sounds and distractions, a place where small infants and often very ill, tiny humans are connected to beeping ventilators, IV alarms and heart monitors. This technology is vitally important to saving small lives. But there is a lot more going on there than our technology measures. And maybe a lot more to saving a life than we usually talk about. 

I remember a text sent to me by a father of a tiny, premature infant in our NICU. His daughter had been in our unit for several weeks. Slowly and surely she was growing bigger and stronger. On the day she reached a 4 pound milestone, Dad texted me: “if only she drank her bottles.  We need to work on that... she needs to practice… so we can go home...”  I listened deeper.  She wasn’t developed enough neurologically to do this.  But I heard his frustration; if only she drank her bottles… it was a measurable task.  It had an end goal dad could understand. Doing this equals go home, which is of course the measure of success in the NICU. I heard his language, but I heard the language that dances on the energy of life within the tiny baby. I took a deep breath, quieted myself before responding.

What I wanted to say to this dad was this:  “This baby needs you in order to grow and develop so she can drink her bottles. She feels safe when held against your skin, laying on your chest or upon mom’s warm full breasts. When she looks into your eyes, she connects with life energy that is secure and full of love. She listens to the rhythm of your heart as it beats a familiar and comforting sound, she knows so well as she grew inside her mother. She breathes a rhythm of calmness.” I wanted him to know that he was doing and providing so much more than he can see. 

In my mind’s eye I could see how babies lay upon their people. I see their small fists unfurl while laying safely upon her parents’ skin. It is like a flower petal unfurling in spring, full of hope and promise. This is a season of human life as well. It is in this energy she blossoms, from this she is given the strength to drink from a bottle and go home. It is this familiar beating of heart that quiets the sounds of the NICU, if only for a few hours a day, where safety, familiarity, comfort and love are the primary energy of this space. It is the rhythm of life force. In this connected space of safety, love, and reciprocal energy she develops fully, brain, body and soul. 

I breathe in deeply and let that breath out. I send dad a simple text that reminds him that he is helping bring his baby girl home, he is connecting, touching, exchanging energy and supporting her growth. I reminded him that the quiet connecting moments are doing important work, that this fosters the neurological maturity that will have her drinking bottles and leaving the NICU, safer and stronger than she was before.  

“Thanks, I needed to hear that”, responded dad. I felt a shift in his energy. The language of life.  

Bringing this calm, rhythmic awareness to the NICU and to parents is what I do. But holding this awareness hasn’t always been as accessible.

As a young child I can remember feeling connected to all the energy within and around me. It was a magical aliveness.  I always knew there was a different kind of visceral life energy, understated in healthcare and too often in life. It was always there, deep in my bones without language.  It was a sense, a feeling, a stirring. Intuition. As I grew older I began listening outside myself. Social norms, institutions, technology, and the expectations of others separated me from my own senses. I began to lose this inner language. I have a memory of things feeling untrue, but I had no one but my tiny self to help protect this truth. I began to lose my inner language. How do we quiet the noise of the world and touch the energy of life? Can these energies of technology and this knowing deep inside me coexist? 

Fortunately, my work in the NICU reawakened this truth.  My heart and soul knew what I did in the NICU was true. It wasn’t measured just in science and data, but in life energy, in feeling and in presence. But it really helps to have support for this knowing. Pilgrim SoULL for me was like this baby finding the safety of her parent’s skin. In this community I could validate my truths. I felt safe to explore my feelings about the intuition we all have if we slow ourselves down enough to listen. 

Physics has proven energy always remains, redirected, released, but it’s always there.

In SoULL I learned that our energies are reciprocal. We each have an energy in flux, moving, changing and responding when we connect with others. With this support, it feels like I’ve come back to myself, to my people. The fuller I am, the more of me there is to share. I imagine it’s ripple effect as I connect with the families and tiny humans I serve. Quieting the noise.

Header image by Tembinkosi Sikupela

Finding and Loving your Pilgrim Soul(l)

By Jeanne Denney

God I love Yeats. And I love poetry.

You know what I love most about writing poetry? Putting one word next to another and having them both explode into something even more wildly true. Some of the words in this poem by Yeats did that for me about the time that I was finding a name for the school. I could not get them out of my head.

 Pilgrim:

1: one who journeys in foreign lands : WAYFARER

2: one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee

Soul:

1. the spiritual part of a person that is believed to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever

Pilgrim. Soul. Wow. The idea that our soul itself, our most essential enduring self, is on a pilgrimage to a holy place, moving lifetime to lifetime through different bodies, different foreign lands and strange situations, on its way somewhere holy. Can’t you just see and feel this as true? My bones do. To be a true pilgrim requires that we leave a known identity (job, family, language, culture, comfort, safety, the land of “the known”) to find something transcendent. Of course. Why else would you do it, but that you longed to meet parts of the self, otherwise unknowable? What else would be worth giving so much up for?

So we go, over hill and dale, on our way somewhere with only a compass, some strange intuition, a map if we are lucky. Relying on the kindness of strangers for a place to sleep and for meals. Relying on the great stream of life that carries us. We are barely aware of what truly carries us when we are in our overly secure (insecure) existence. But on the road, without our usual baggage, as pilgrims, we become very aware of it. We learn to swim in it. The soul knows itself as movement. As beauty.

I loved the words “Pilgrim” and “Soul” so much together we eventually named the first year of the school for this. It requires moving away from comfortable but misleading delusions of our culture, out on the open road with others. Changing up our view of life and seeing larger patterns, finding self, just like a pilgrim.

But there is more to this line than those two words. Yeats says “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you”. He distinguishes between ordinary garden variety vain love of self-interest, (you know, love of the beautiful people that you get enamored by), and the deeper movement of love that sees more.

But wait! He isn’t done. In the next line where this one loving man does something more than love the pilgrim soul. He loves “the sorrows of your changing face”; Woah!! Stunning!

As a woman in her 60’s I know well the difference between love false and true. But to be loved for our changing faces (not just accepted) is a real wake up to love. It is easy to be attached to youthful excitement, but to love the movement of change itself as sorrows overtake us and flesh falls. Wow. That is a true promise of love. I feel that in my bones too.

I hope that you are aware of at least one or two people in your life who have seen and loved you like this. Maybe it is a childhood friend who has watched you move from town to town or from partner to partner, or has seen you through illnesses and bankruptcies. Maybe it is an old love you have known before this life and will know again in another one. Maybe it is a war buddy who went to near death with you and knows a part of you few others do. Maybe it is a parent. Now and then, we find loves that transcend our identity and the form that our body has taken. THAT seeing. They follow you, however imperfectly, through all kinds of different landscapes, roles, fortunes. These folks are not connected to us through our personae, our “moments of glad grace”. They are dancing with our soul. Our task is to recognize them. Thank them. And to see and love their moving souls too.

The fact is, we all long for this kind of seeing and this kind of connecting and this kind of love. We need it. It should not be rare. The more we connect to this part of ourselves, the more people we see deeply and love deeply. On the other hand, when we identify with only our outer personae, aging makes us despair. We have difficulty finding love that truly satisfies. We have a pervasive feeling of disconnection. But connected to this deep, moving current of life within us, somehow we source vitality, no matter what condition we are in or what problem we have, even on our deathbed. Our heart finds a way to carry us. Our love goes deeper.

The truth is, you can learn to see like this and love like this. It is your birthright. It may be easier than you think to find the pilgrim soul in you and in others, and to allow others to love it. There are ways to move from despair. Even though the face may be changing.

Trust me, you are so much more.

Header photo by Finding Dan | Dan Grinwis

SoULL in the Pandemic

By Barbara Pettibone

Hey, my name is Barbara.

I’m a SoULL student and a Clinical Social Worker. I’ve worked in the mental health field for much of the past 45 years (yikes). With the onset of the pandemic however, I found myself becoming increasingly isolated, almost reclusive. I had not been seeing clients for some time, preferring to hunker down and pull inward rather than engage with what seemed an increasingly irrational world. Then, I learned about SoULL, this strange school that embraced a body/mind perspective of healing. Curious, I decided to take the plunge because empty pandemic days were taking me nowhere.

I began Pilgrim SoULL in the summer of 2020 and my world opened up dramatically. Not only was I in an online community, but much of that community was from Europe, so here I was studying with an international community in the middle of a pandemic. Wow! To say that I “took” or “completed” Pilgrim SoULL is a misnomer because it was an experience that only began with Unit 1. I realize now that the deep learning, the energy of the group as we worked with one another, testing questions and ideas, role playing power structures, doing individual process work under the eyes of our companions – all of this allowed me to not only survive the pandemic, but also to grow and plant more seeds in the soil of myself that continue to bloom. Experiencing the pandemic with European friends through distance and virtual group meetings reinforced my understanding of how much we share and how connected we are.

With this burgeoning awareness came the realization that maybe I still had something to offer as a therapist. So, probably due to a combination of individual therapy and SoULL, I began working again as an online therapist. This was a miraculous change for me. I felt useful again, and received so much support from my classmates.

Putting what I learned into words isn’t easy. Let me try to explain what it feels like. First, everything in the world is so much more alive than it ever was before. I see movement, breathing, everywhere. Death is no longer something to be dreaded but a part of a cycle that keeps on going. I often feel ready to burst with clients who speak of their fear of death, wanting to tell them, “No! It’s all okay. It never stops.”, but I restrain myself and listen. I try to help them open further to this glorious life in a more subtle way. I use this study in other places in my work with clients: in helping the anxious ones to ground themselves and breathe; those who are depressed to reach into their early wounds and pull out hope; those who are suicidal to see that there are other options to the darkness they feel. I see their body struggles so much more clearly than before, along with my own. I work to ground us all.

Now I’m really looking forward to SoULL Year 2. The first year experience is growing me every single minute – growing Barbara into a more connected and loving being. What I’m most enthused about now is learning to further integrate SoULL into my work with clients, and I hope to focus on this in Year 2.

So may we continue to grow as a school and SoULL as a force in our hearts. I am so blessed to have found you.

Header photo by John Thomas

A Place at the SoULL TABLE

“Oh hey there- ! Hi ! …Come on in… I’ll get the door for you. We were just sitting down to share a meal and we saved a place for you at the table. Are you hungry? How was your day?”

Imagine feeling embraced by this greeting walking into a group of strangers. This is a reflection of how it felt on my first day of SoULL Unit one. I could feel these inviting words echoing from the group.

Growing up I spent a lot of time after school at a friend's house whose mom would sit and talk with us every day around the family kitchen table. When we came bouncing in she would stop what she was doing, sit us down at the table and make us something to eat, and talk to us about our day. She made us peanut butter sandwiches and we drank juice from recycled jelly jars that had cartoon characters on them. My favorite had a cat and mouse on it. My friends had a dinosaur. I looked forward every day after school to going to my friends house and us talking around that kitchen table. As I grew older I realized it wasn’t the kitchen table, the fun jelly jars of juice or even the peanut butter sandwiches that I looked forward to each day. It was the sharing and the connection that was so special when we gathered.

Unit one of SoULL felt like a gathering of close family/friends sharing around a kitchen table. And like someone was holding the door for me as I walked into class holding both my fears and courage by the hand. I could feel the “soles” of my shoes were worn from walking a journey and living a story I hadn’t shared before. And my “soul” became instantly aware of the untold stories in my heart. It was like learning a foreign, yet familiar language. How many of us, afterall, remember who we were before the world told us who we were supposed to be? It had been a while since I felt fed.

Before you read on, feel free to take a breath with me, if you’d like: Sit back, relax your neck and shoulders.…take a slow breath in and inhale gently… now exhale slowly... Relaxing that little space between your eyebrows … and focus on your breath. Now relax your jaw and breathe in again. This time breathe in a feeling of deep compassion and exhale a feeling of deep peace.

After taking this breath, you might feel as I did after experiencing many of our classes. I felt more at ease and maybe like the edge-y parts inside were smoothed a bit. I had a deeper feeling of self awareness and like I dropped into a deeper sense of belonging inside myself as a result of our classes.

On my first day of Unit one, I felt a bit like I was getting ready to give my first speech in front of my 3rd grade class. I was nervous and knew I’d be sharing parts of me, but didn’t know which parts or to what extent. I started a letter to myself a week before class began that was filled with my fears and “what if’s” and “I don’t think I cans”. Just minutes before the class started I quickly finished the letter to myself writing:

“But what if I fail?…. Oh, but Darling, what if you fly?”

Peace and love,

G.

After sealing the envelope, I entered the class, fears and all. And I’m so thankful I did. What I experienced was invaluable. It changed my world view and gave me a new interpersonal framework from which to build. I learned more about our changing rhythms and movements that are interconnected with nature, as well as our expansions and contractions. I found a gathering place where each of us had a gift to bring. And a place where all of our gifts were welcomed.

SoULL Unit one was reminiscent of a welcoming place and a gathering table for my younger self, around which we shared our common threads of our humanness: our strengths and fears, our joys and struggles, our clarity and uncertainties. All of our internal pulses that make us human were welcomed at this table.

Now I can share this with you:

Oh hey there-! Hi! Come on in. I’ll get the door for you. We were just sitting down to share a meal and I saved a place for you at the table. Are you hungry? How was your day?

Thanks for taking a breath with me.

Gina Rubin

Kenosha One Year Later: Healing the American Heart

Last year, unrest broke out in Kenosha WI, just a few miles from my home in Racine. I did some writing on Facebook. As we wait for more verdicts with 500 National Guard soldiers penetrating in the town, it seemed good to share these posts here. One written in June of 2020, on in August. May they help us reflect and remember, even what we may have gained in one year.

Love,

Jeanne

June 1, 2020

Sitting here last night with Kenosha under Civil Emergency and Racine on alert. The realization I have to write something that I haven't been able to express. It will come.

Right now there is just a feeling that saying "Black lives matter" just isn't enough to say. I mean of course, and it has maybe helped to say something simple. But like duh. That is the lowest bar.

We have to go further. We have to kneel and say as whiteish Americans to blackish Americans: Black lives don't just matter, they are profoundly needed, necessary, essential, loved, have added untold value to American culture and spirit, have been our rock. Without your heart and soul we are definitely, definitely not Americans. "Black culture" (which IS American culture) has held incredible, incredible space for heart, integrity, spirituality, faith, humility, wisdom, rhythm, muscle, intelligence, song, strength under profound duress. From the first day of my first grade classroom when I met my first darker skinned classmates, it has held me up, helped me laugh, helped me learn, helped me remember the deeper truths I can forget in the culture and skin I was born in. I bow deeply to these gifts and this wealth, to your generosity.

To say you have suffered too much under the yoke of white pride, white violence and white fear is to understate it. It has to stop. But we can't neglect to give honoring, thanks, gratitude too. I, for one, would never want an America without all of this in it. Can you imagine how tight assed we would be? Not to mention how much more paranoid, traumatized and insane. Good God, thank you. Thank you. May we learn to love your gifts even more.

And to my black friends, please keep guiding us in what it means to help shift insanity. For now, I will work on what I need to write, put on my mask and go to the protest Tuesday here in Racine. In solidarity for way more than the end of brutality. For the creation of a new vision of a tolerant, loving, creative country that we seem to have to reclaim and again and again and again...

August 27, 2020

It’s hard to express how much is running through my body and soul right at this moment. That is why I haven't been writing I guess.

Just seven miles away, another American war zone opens up. Seven miles from my house in Racine, her sister city, Kenosha: fire, bullets, blood and glass where a tidy waterfront town used to be. As they say here, what happens in one town usually happens in the other sooner or later. We are praying this isn't so.

My move to the midwest from NY 20 months ago was inspired at least in part by the 2016 election and the grief I felt that year returning to my hometown in the Midwest. I felt a deep desire to return to somewhere home-like. To participate in something I didn't have words for, in a way that felt right to me: as a member of a not-too-big town in the middle of the country. By water.

And now here it is. Another election. A world full of Fire. Too much fire. And here I am, in Racine, embedded in the web of it.

My handyman was a former cop on the Kenosha force. We have had talks about the cop trauma, cop fear and the evolution of cop machismo and his own confusing experiences. He is buddies with the cop who pulled the trigger, who lives in his neighborhood. One degree of separation. Both of them fully human, I am sure feeling that they are doing their best for others. Meanwhile, in my other worlds, I know wonderful activists and advocates of BLM, some of whom are formerly incarcerated. Surely they know fear almost all the time. They are also fully human, doing their best to be in service to right change.

How to hold it all. Where does the healing begin?

In the last several years, I have focused on bringing teachings forward through SoULL. Some people think that these teachings are about death. They aren't. They are about everything. How we live in a sea of relationships. How relationships form and un-form. How we are at least partly tribal. How tribes form and un-form.

Healthy and unhealthy lives and relationships. Healthy and unhealthy tribes. Healthy and unhealthy relationships between tribes. How tribes exchange and help each other (and people in them) grow, or combat each other's growth. The key to all of this has been in watching how individual bodies and energy systems change. So I teach that.

And that is what I am thinking about now as we look for new way of being in a post tech-revolution world. This revolution has challenged our basic systems of relationship, identity and exchange. Such swift changes are hard for our mind/bodies to get used to, being as they evolved over so many centuries for such different ways. I am thinking that we need to remember the old wisdom of how to really be human again. No matter what kind or tribe or identity, our bodies teach about our common humanity.

Anyway, I will spend the weekend writing about all of this.

In the meantime, I ask for your prayers for Kenosha, for Racine, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and all of the cities where the fires of confusion, change and fear are raging.

Pray for water. Rain, healing rain, and the ability for our deeper natures to grow together again, inspiring and supporting each other like these two sister cities, Racine and Kenosha, have done again and again in their history. Two tribes that have grown so similar by rubbing their backs against each other day after day, night after night. Coming to each other's aide.

Header photo by Markus Spiske

The Breathing Relationship (And What I Wish Every Child Knew)

By Jeanne Denney

Lots of people think that I teach just about death, dying and grief. Well, I do. But the thing is, death taught me so much about all the rest of life, and almost every natural thing in it, that it was no longer possible to think about anything the same way.  One of the biggest things that hospice work taught me about, though, was relationships. That, and…ok, years of therapy work with clients.  Through all of that I began to understand relationships as organized energy, as pulsing, changing, forming and unforming bonds that had an almost physical reality without actually being physical.  I learned relationships as nature. Relationships as both temporal and eternal.  These are things our culture should teach very clearly.  But, alas, it doesn’t.  And so uneducated about our very nature, we bumble around, usually damaging mind, body and each other.

Through couples work, my own relationship “undoings”, the teachings of clients’ lives, I have come to see small and large endings as predictable and even a necessary and living parts of relationship.  I could see that there was a deep conversation between beginnings and endings, that the formation of a relationship left very deep imprints on what came after, as if our nascent beginnings lay down tracks for the future.  As I watched hospice patients and their loved ones navigating ending together, or couples in conflict, there was LOTS (and lots) of old stuff making bids for resolution.   It was quite an education.  A deep one.

There are predictable patterns in relationship processes we can learn.  And there are definitely things we can learn to make them better.  Since loneliness is epidemic and relationship trauma is on the rise, let me waste no time and offer a brief summary.  Here are…

Seven things I wish every school child was taught about relationships:

• Relationships are REALLY important. We need them to thrive or even survive. They are deeply connected to our bodies.

• Relationships are energetic structures between people. They are part of nature.

• These energetic structures are alive. They change predictably over time. They have to be grown and tended like tomatoes. When we don’t, the relationship gets sickly or can die.

• A sick relationship, or one that “died” badly can make us sick if we don’t attend to it.

• Control and domination hurts a relationship (which, remember, is a living thing). So do cut offs and “ghosting”. These are violations of connection that hurt everyone.

• Some parts of relationships end and those endings are important. Some parts seem to be forever, especially so if we do our endings well. If you want it to have a deep aliveness you have to learn to tolerate and even cultivate good micro-endings.

• Relationships thrive on well-paced rhythmic exchange, the somewhat predictable alternation between contact and “space holding”. We get a lot of our information on the other person through the pattern of this dance of “toward and away”.

Let’s talk about that last one for a minute. Our culture sees Toward and Away as Love versus Separation. Gosh this reminds me of another false opposition I like to rail about:  Life versus Death.  We are not only a youth focused, death-phobic culture, and we are also an ATTACHMENT focused, differentiation-phobic culture.  That means that we think of attachment and closeness as more loving than holding space or giving distance.   The “falling IN love” part is wonderful.  The falling away is sad and horrible.  Remind you of the Life is good, Death is bad bias?

But wait just a darned minute.  Is this true?  I bet everyone has had the experience of shutting down emotionally because someone is just too unrelentingly close or clinging or demanding or controlling (ah, the dark side of attachment).  So somewhere along the line, an attachment that is not love can happen.  That is probably about the place where space would naturally come into the picture for regulation, integration and rest but may have been resisted.   Because relationships want to BREATHE (move, dance, modulate, exhale, inhale, pulsate) just like other living things.   These delicate creations need to move BOTH toward and away to be vital.  The loving opposite of dark attachment is actually the ability to tolerate and celebrate the beauty of someone’s differentiation process, even if they are differentiating from…US in that moment.

And can there be TOO much space?  Well of course.  We all know what that feels like too, don’t we?  Waiting too long for a response, having our “bids for attention” ignored by another.  Ghosting.  Yuck.  It stinks, doesn’t it?  Being unwilling or unable to reliably engage in a rhythmic exchange of energy is another distortion of space. It damages relationships just as much.  For some people the offer of more space means love.  For others more attachment/closeness means love.  And in these two differences so many relationships struggle.

The deeper truth seems to be that attachment and differentiation processes are both essential parts of love.  Maybe love is that rhythmic, attuned communication that knows how to reliably honor the regular toward and away.  Looked at this way, we usually don’t have to reject, replace or eject the other person or find a replacement someone to relate to.  Maybe we just need to learn to do relationship dance:  to find new roles, or tolerate another person’s changes as true.  Maybe we need to ask not what I or you need, but what the relationship itself needs at any given moment .  How much love does that take?  Maybe a lot.  But I can’t think of a better way to spend my time in this world than working toward that dance.

I could go on and on with stories. There is a lot more to say. You can learn more about relationship dynamics and fostering connection through my relationship audio program that will be available in a few weeks. Sign up for our email newsletter for updates.