What We Come Up With

I mean, I have to wonder what it would do to simply have a seat in your very comfortable counseling office and sit down for a few minutes to speak to everyone about some things you think would be fairly helpful for everyone.

I suppose it could be interesting.

If you did, where would you start?

Well that's easy, I would start by telling them to allow the counselor within to attend to whatever is alive inside of them… Just to listen very quietly and gently…

To watch tenderly whatever imagery arises… As they breathe and settle in to their bodies.

Sadly, quite often folks will be working with enemy imagery, something someone said or did that stimulated discomfort.

I invite them to think back to a phrase or word that was said. Then back to the breathing… To feel it in the body and notice quietly whatever happens inside.

From there maybe I'd invite them to try to name some feelings. What might sensations in the body be pointing to emotionally, what feelings are present? Then we'd moved on to – thoughts that they notice our splashing to the surface – they could say "These are my thoughts – this is the movie that's playing inside my head" whenever they return to the trigger (what was said or done, what a cell phone could record.)

As they disentangle thoughts and feelings, I might invite them to pay attention to the real basic human desire or longing that seems to be charging or giving life to them. Behind or beneath all of the different strategies and ideas one might be coming up with to solve or fix the problem or the other person, what is it that YOU are really wanting at a soul level?

As soon as one is able to name that longing (not a specific strategy or specific proposal) they will begin enacting a reopening of themselves to bring that very value out into the world through free choosing. Quite often this new burst of energy ends up flourishing into some sort of creative contribution or a request of oneself to try to be and move and live in a new way because it's freedom for them, and fullness; much more than they had before.

I'm Listening to Kitaro

Lying face down in the grass
which is still wet with rain. It is
even more green up close. Weeds

have gone to seed all over so
there are birds everywhere nestled
around me. Feeding. Nourishing

While they dream. They took trees
down, one older than your great-grandfather, three houses past ours, on
this street of sorrows. Its enormous

Life is over. I smelled sawdust pasty
on the asphalt, fallen down into cool
brazen veins.

The damp still held the smoke, echoed
the daylong grinding down, the secret
burning edges. The teeth of steel.

Now again the storm relents, they
return to feast, to tweet, to turn me
to my back, my dreams one day

of becoming a tree.