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
