Fourth Wave Feminism
A new women's spiritual activist movement that has emerged
since September 11 is gathering women across faiths
by Pythia Peay
On
September 11, 2001 , California psychotherapist Kathlyn Schaaf
was overwhelmed by a powerful thought. Watching the violent
images on television, she suddenly felt the time had come to
“gather the women.” She wasn't alone. Schaaf and 11 others who
shared her response soon created Gather the Women, a Web site
and communications hub that 5000 women have used to chronicle
their local events in support of world peace. As women assembled
near the pyramids in Egypt and held potluck dinners in Alaska
, staged candlelight vigils and other rituals in countries around
the world, it confirmed Schaaf's gut instinct that an untapped
reserve of energy “lays like oil beneath the common ground the
women share.”
Since
then, the group has organized a series of congresses to connect
women's groups. Their work is one example of a new kind feminism,
slowly growing for a decade and now bursting out everywhere.
At its heart lies a new kind of political activism that's guided
and sustained by spirituality. Some are calling it the long-awaited
“Fourth Wave” of feminism—a fusion of spirituality and social
justice reminiscent of the American civil rights movement and
Ghandi's call for nonviolent change. This phenomenon is most
visible in the popular conferences organized by women spiritual
and religious leaders. Just as important are those meeting privately
to meditate and pray, to study the world, and to support each
other in social action. These gatherings share a commitment
to a universal spirituality that affirms women's bonds across
ethnic and religious boundaries. They're also exploring a new
feminine paradigm of power that's based on tolerance, mutuality,
and reverence for nature that have long been identified with
women—values they now see as crucial to curing the global pathologies
of poverty and war.
Previous
advances in American feminism have rarely happened smoothly;
the gains of one generation have often both shaped and conflicted
with the ambitions of the next. First-wave feminists fought
for women's suffrage. Led in the 1970s by icons like Gloria
Steinem and Betty Friedan, a second wave pushed for economic
and legal gains. Their ideals would eventually clash with the
spirited individualism of third-wave feminists, women in their
20s and 30s who still advocate for women's rights while embracing
a “girlie culture” that celebrates sex, men, gay culture, and
clothes.
But
as never before, today's conservative political environment
has united women across the feminist spectrum. The result differs
from earlier forms of feminism in several ways. For one, it
espouses a new activism based not in anger, but in joy. It also
tends to be focused outward, beyond the individual to wider
issues, often global in scope. In the words of author Carole
Lee Flinders, “feminism catches fire when it draws on its inherent
spirituality,” which means something else can happen as well.
“When you get Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi women
all practicing their faith in the same room,” she recently said,
“another religion emerges, which is feminine spirituality.”
Though
Flinders and other writers have been calling on women to reconnect
with the sacred for years, many agree that the tipping point
was 9/11. Before then, a women's spirituality conference called
Sacred Circles, held biannually at Washington National Cathedral
in the nation's capital, had focused on personal spirituality.
More recently, however, program director Grace Ogden said she
felt compelled to use the gatherings to address religious violence.
“There was this sense of something gone terribly wrong, she
said, “of communities splitting apart and a growing suspicion
of people of Arab descent or other traditions.” Her planning
committee has since become more interfaith than in the past.
Recent Sacred Circles conferences have stressed the role of
compassion and tolerance in addressing political, economic,
and religious differences.
Appalled
by the lack of women in positions of religious authority on
9/11, Dena Merriam, a New York arts writer and public relations
executive, joined others trying to form an international network
of women religious leaders from the major faiths. On October
2002, they launched the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious
and Spiritual Leaders in Geneva , Switzerland . Associated with
the United Nations, the initiative wants to get religious leaders
more involved in UN peace-building plans. Specific programs
aim to help young woman of different faiths to communicate in
places in like Jerusalem that have been torn by conflict.
Merriam,
the group's convener, said that one of women's strengths in
peace work stems from their greatest weakness—their long exile
from authority inside mainstream institutions. “Suddenly women
are beginning to realize that their outsider status is an asset,”
she said, leaving them free to act directly, outside institutional
lines. Many women are following the fate of UN Resolution 1325,
which, if passed, will mandate that women be involved in all
peace negotiations.
Feminism's
new direction was perhaps most striking at the Women & Power
conference, sponsored by the Omega Institute and V-Day in New
York City last September. The 3000 attendees heard celebrity
feminists like Jane Fonda, Sally Field, and Gloria Steinem herself
note the shift. Playwright Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day, a movement
to stop global violence against women and girls, addressed the
need to change the face of power. Today, she said, our power
is seen in terms of “country over country, tribe against tribe.”
The new paradigm, however, has to be about power “in the service
of,” collaboration not conquest.
The
free-flow of creative expression at these assemblies marks a
radical departure from the church coffees of our mother's era.
Like making a quilt from bits and pieces, participants often
join together in fashioning new rites and rituals from ancient
traditions, shaping forms at once old and new. Organizers at
the Women & Power conference draped one room in carpets
and labeled it the “Red Tent” area, evoking the Jewish ritual
popularized by the book of that name. Elizabeth Lesser, a co-founder
of the Omega Institute, said the room was like “an ancient gathering
place where women were laughing, crying, brushing each other's
hair, praying, and meditating. It seemed to satisfy women's
deepest longings and was spiritual in a very feminine way.”
At gatherings big and small, many are realizing that putting
themselves in the service of the world is feminism's next step.
Especially at a time when the United States is viewed with increasing
distrust by other countries, feminism's shift cultivating a
spiritually informed activism may help to repair our diplomatic
ties. No less important is the special depth that comes from
quiet reflection closer to home. As Carole Lee Flinders notes,
a “serious spiritual life with a strong inward dimension” is
crucial in itself, releasing the energy that can turn visionary
feminist theory into action.
Meanwhile,
as feminism allows more women to reach positions of power in
American culture, increasing numbers have discovered that material
success does not satisfy their hunger for meaning and connection.
Women are becoming increasingly clear and vocal about the need
to integrate an emerging set of feminine-based values into the
culture. As the Democratic Party searches for a guiding set
of values, they might consider turning to the women's spirituality
movement for inspiration.
This article originally appeared in Utne
Magazine
Back to Top
Putting a Feminine Face on Buddhism; Women Emphasize Humanizing
Aspects of Teachings
If
the Buddha had been born a woman, would future generations have
known more about his intimate feelings? Would they know of the
sorrow he might have felt growing up without his mother, who
died during childbirth, or the anguish he might have felt when,
as a young man, he left his family to seek enlightenment?
Like
the world's great prophets, the Buddha generated a body of wisdom
that has endured over the centuries, yet he left behind little
trace of his emotional life.
As
feminists once sought to link the personal and the political,
however, a growing number of American women Buddhist teachers
are connecting the personal and the spiritual. In books and
workshops, they are speaking out on the way their emotional
experiences of love and suffering have shaped their inner development.
In
the process, they are humanizing the traditionally impersonal
face of Buddhism.In her classic book, When Things Fall Apart:
Heart Advice for Difficult Times, for example, the American-born
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron describes how her husband's affair
and their subsequent divorce sparked her spiritual quest.
"When
anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism," she wrote,
"I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband.
The truth is that he saved my life."
Likewise,
Vipassana lay teacher Sharon Salzberg wrote in Faith: Trusting
Your Own Deepest Experience how a childhood driven by despair
- abandoned by her father at age 4 and an orphan by age 9 -
compelled her to seek out spiritual truths after a childhood
"curled up in bed, lost in a separate shadowed existence
built of sadness."
A
college class on Buddhism seemed to offer Salzberg a way out
of her melancholy. Reading about the Buddha's Third Noble Truth
- liberation from suffering - she writes that she began to glimpse
"the possibility of defining myself by something other
than my family's painful struggles and its hardened tone of
defeat."
She
took up the study of Buddhism in earnest on a trip to India,
adopting the Buddha's story about freedom from suffering as
her own new narrative on life. She is now the senior teacher
at the Insight Meditation Society and Center for Buddhist Studies
in Barre, Mass.
Yet
while Buddhist practices may have played a role in transforming
Salzberg's painful childhood wounds, she in turn contributed
her own experience as a contemporary Western woman to certain
core doctrines.
Take,
for example, the Buddhist philosophy of detachment, which many
equate with cutting off feelings. Salzberg's own understanding
of the principle of nonattachment, however, is more nuanced.
"When
we're in the grip of certain emotions like anger, fear or jealousy,
our world gets very small," she said in an interview. "So
the teaching is not to push them away but to be able to feel
what we're feeling and not lose perspective. Mindfulness and
detachment is about being connected in a much
larger way when we're lost."
At
first she thought great meditative attainment or committing
the Buddha's teachings to memory would make her a great teacher.
But as people turned to her for counsel on the stresses and
tragedies in their lives, she realized it was her own understanding
of suffering that helped her respond to their needs with genuine
empathy.
Tara
Brach, who teaches the Vipassana tradition at the Insight Meditation
Community of Washington, D.C., said she deliberately avoids
the word "detachment" in her writing and teaching.
Brach,
the author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the
Heart of a Buddha, said many traditional interpretations of
Buddhism foster an "aversion towards attachment and desire"
that ultimately leads to a "deep distrust of the body and
emotions, or the notion that life itself is bad."
Brach
said her initial encounter with Buddhist teachings put her in
conflict with her feminine nature because they seemed to say
that human love and strong caring for another were obstacles
that would make her "less free" and that she was supposed
to get rid of her wants and needs.
Yet,
during the years, Brach came to understand that the Buddha's
basic teaching was that the true source of suffering arises
"when we forget the Buddha nature - the true essence of
who we really are. And Buddha nature is love and awareness,"
she said in an interview.
Brach
and Salzberg said they have not changed the basic tradition
of Buddhism. Rather, they have turned their attention to a "feminine
stream" of practices contained within the framework of
traditional Buddhism that has been previously overlooked.
Both,
for instance, work with the practice of Metta, or loving kindness,
that has been central to all the schools of Buddhism throughout
the centuries. "Today they are coming alive in the West,
especially where they are being developed and applied to difficult
emotions and relationships,"
Brach said.
One
reason for the shift toward these Buddhist practices may be
because they offer a healing solution to modern society's emphasis
on outer achievement at the expense of inner well-being.
Brach,
who is also a psychotherapist, bemoaned the suffering she has
witnessed caused by the "trance of unworthiness" -
the shame that arises when people can't measure up to impossible
standards of perfection. "The antidote to that is cultivating
the quality of tenderness and receptivity to life just as it
is," she said.
Salzberg
had a similar exchange with the spiritual leader of Tibetan
Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, when she mentioned the self-hatred
so many Westerners felt. "He said, 'What's that?'"
she recalled. "He was so shocked, he wondered if it was
some kind of nervous disorder."
"He
looked at us and said, 'But you have Buddha-nature.' Because,
according to Buddha's teaching, if you really knew who you were,
you would find the capacity for love and compassion and connection
and understanding and freedom," she said, "because
Buddha nature is in all of us.
Back to Top
God
as a Woman
For those more familiar
with a heavenly father,
imagining God as a woman can be a profound spiritual exercise.
By PYTHIA PEAY
Say
the word "God" and what comes to mind? Close your
eyes and pray: Who is the being who hears the cries of your
innermost heart? For more than 2,500 years that question has
been answered almost exclusively in masculine imagery and language.
Centuries of patriarchy have left a lasting imprint of God as
a male deity on the human psyche. As familiar as this heavenly
father may seem, however, most of the world's religions trace
their roots back to an ancient source: the Goddess. Older even
than the image of God as a man, in fact, is that of God as a
woman.
What
if, just like our ancestors, we talked to God as if "She"
were a woman? What if, when we bowed our heads to pray or crossed
our legs to meditate we deliberately brought to mind a presence
that was feminine in nature? To some, such a practice may seem
an unspoken criticism of the masculine gender. To others seeking
to evolve more inclusive expressions of spirituality, relating
to God in a gender-specific way can seem like a step backward.
But the essence of spirituality is wholeness. And to genuinely
experience the aspect of God that is beyond form and gender
means that we must first integrate both sides of our nature
-- the yin and yang of the soul.
For far too long, both women and men have been orphaned of their
divine parentage: raised by a Father God, they have lacked a
Mother Goddess to care for their spiritual needs. Indeed, a
part of all our history and a part of all our souls has been
missing. Just as archaeologists have uncovered temples to the
goddess buried beneath churches, so, too, is there a deeper
layer in all our souls waiting to be excavated.
How might we begin to unearth our feminine spiritual nature?
For one thing, we can start with the simple practice of using
feminine figures of speech in our prayers or meditations. Many
ancient hymns to the Goddess, for example, describe Her as the
"Lady of life," "Queen of Heaven," or "Mother
of the world." Language shapes our perception of reality
-- including inner states of consciousness. And though it may
sound strange at first, adopting feminine pronouns and adjectives
can evoke a powerful shift in the way we relate to and experience
God. In my own contemplative practice, I have found that doing
this infuses my dialogue with the divine with a sweet intimacy.
Often, I let my heart speak, composing such endearments as "She,
who encircles the stars and the universe with love, heal my
soul." Or, I recite an already existing prayer, replacing
"She" for "He," "Her" for "Him,"
or "Goddess" for "God."
Indeed, a feminine-based practice can complement, rather than
replace, the rituals and services of the church, synagogue,
mosque, or spiritual community we may already belong to. Most
of the world's faiths, for instance, include within them women
holy figures, both real and mythical. Meditating deeply on the
Goddess as She has appeared throughout history is a gateway
to the mysteries of the divine feminine.
Many
times I have focused my inner eye on the Buddhist Kuan Yin.
In imagining Her as She pauses in Her ascent after attaining
enlightenment, pulled back toward earth by the cries of the
suffering, my own heart opens to the pain of the human condition.
The statue of Artemis of Ephesus, layered in rows of nurturing
breasts and animals, awakens me to the nurturing force of nature.
The prehistoric wide-hipped, full-bodied fertility Goddess figures
have restored my faith in the sacred beauty of the female body
and its life-giving powers. I have found that visualizing the
Goddess when praying for others is especially powerful, as She
embodies maternal protection.
Acceptance of the body as sacred, in fact, is central to a Goddess-inspired
practice. Rather than the monastic ideal of renunciation in
which instinct and desire are viewed as a hindrance to union
with God, feminist spirituality cherishes physical incarnation
in all its richness. Whether sexuality, childbirth, or hunger,
the desires and needs of the body are considered holy rather
than sinful. In this sense, imagining God as a woman awakens
the part of us that is endlessly creative and regenerative.
Thus the children we raise, the projects we initiate, or the
dishes we cook become living prayers -- colorful celebrations
of the miraculous gift of life.
This step-by-step shift from the masculine to the feminine can
even affect how we contemplate the formless aspect of the Divine.
Though we may not think of it this way, the use of words like
"detached," and "impersonal" carry masculine
overtones. From a feminine perspective, the mystical experience
of oneness becomes less like the void of emptiness and more
like swimming in a womb of space that is vibrant with potential
life. In this oceanic light, we experience the Goddess as the
essence of such qualities as forgiveness, mercy, and unconditional
acceptance - the feminine aspect of every religion. In my own
deepest moments of mystical participation with the divine feminine,
I have felt bathed in waves of the rarest joy, as if the background
hum of all creation is the happy-sounding laughter of the Goddess.
Indeed, if there is one thing contemplating God as a woman awakens,
it is the soulful patience to bear with the process of life
in all its wonder and uncertainty. From a theological perspective,
a feminine-based contemplation deepens our capacity for a faith
based on inner knowing, rather than external doctrine. It means
acceptance of things as they are, rather than how we want them
to be. It is about connecting to the cyclic wisdom in the rhythms
of nature, in which things ripen in their own time. By restoring
the long-buried Goddess to Her rightful place in our spiritual
lives this way, we help to heal an old wound -- redressing history's
omission and making whole our souls that have been halved too
long.
Back to Top
Who
are you really?
November
/ December 2002
By Pythia Peay, Utne
Listen
to the call of your soul - and change your life
What is your mission in life? It’s a question as eternal
and universal as it is daunting. Faced with the demands of daily
living, finding the time and emotional space necessary to figure
out your calling can seem like searching for the Holy Grail.
Yet, as the articles in this cover section make clear, the pilgrimage
you undertake to find your true purpose in the world usually
doesn’t involve tromping off to farawary places. More
often it means taking a deep breath, turning inward, and asking
yourself another tough question: Who are you now?
The first whisper of my life’s calling came as a fascination
for all things old and mysterious. A dreamy child, I was pulled
to the stars in the night sky and to tumbledown buildings; to
fairy tales, ghosts, and the Latin chanting during Sunday Mass.
Around the age of 10, I interpreted these vague stirrings to
mean that my mission in life was to solve mysteries, and I ordered
a "professional detective" set out of the back of
a magazine. When I unwrapped the package to find a cheap set
of handcuffs and a cracked toy magnifying glass, I suffered
the first of many disillusionments on the road to finding my
calling.
I set my sights next on becoming an archaeologist. Then came
my "first woman" dreams—the first woman president,
the first woman on the moon. Instead, caught up in the heady
uprush of the ’60s counterculture, I became the first
hippie in my corner of Missouri and wrote a column lyrically
titled "Wildflowers" for the high school newspaper.
In it, I set the small conservative town I lived in on its ear
by asking people to consider the possibility that they might
have encountered Jesus in a past lifetime. The surprisingly
thoughtful responses I received initiated me into the magic
of ideas and words to convey fresh perspectives on life. And
in some form or another, I’ve been doing the same thing
ever since.
While this path seems so clear in retrospect, my life has many
times felt like a chaotic jumble of interests tugging in wildly
divergent directions. Meditation teacher, clothing designer,
historical novelist, astrologer: I’ve worked at them all
over the years. But somewhere along the way, a subtle but uncompromising
force pared away the things I was not meant to do and held me
to the tasks I seemed, in the end, to do best. Call it fate,
call it destiny, call it my "calling." I’m here
in this world, I’ve finally realized, to discuss and write
about what first lifted my gaze to the night sky as a child—the
deeper, mythic side of life. This discovery feels less like
evolving into someone new than like returning to who I always
was in the first place. "You never lose the image in which
your soul is shaped," writes Jungian psychologist James
Hillman in The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and
Calling (Random House, 1996). "Everyone is marked; each
of us is singular."
To find our mission in the world, to arrive at that place where
our lives make sense as part of an elegant pattern of purpose,
is probably the underlying quest of all human endeavor. In the
privacy of our hearts we wrestle with a nagging sense of fate—of
opportunities missed and things undone—and question whether
we are living the life we were meant to live. Unlike great religious
prophets whose callings were revealed in heavenly voices, or
those rare geniuses born with an unmistakable talent, most people
must struggle to define their destinies amid a chorus of conflicting
duties and expectations. Yet beneath the everyday struggle of
life, we all yearn for a clear sense of calling that will order
the elements of our lives into a coherent and satisfying whole.
THERE ARE STRONG SIGNS today that many people, driven perhaps
by the uncertain political climate or the shifting sands of
financial markets, have begun seeking a more meaningful personal
plotline than the American way of getting and spending. Romantic,
large-souled ideals from centuries past—vision, vocation,
destiny—have re-entered our conversations. In her best-selling
book Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (Harmony
Books, 2001), healer Caroline Myss notes that she is more frequently
asked to help people find their purpose in life than to counsel
them on their illnesses. A recent USA Today poll discovered
that if people could ask just one question of God or a higher
power, a majority would want to know their purpose in life.
Why is it that, in a culture that reveres the myth of the self-made
individual, the search to uncover one’s calling should
prove so difficult for so many? Financial pressures, for one
thing, stand as a deterrent. Some people simply don’t
have the luxury of exploring their mission in life beyond meeting
the rent and putting food on the table. And with money increasingly
marking Americans’ sense of self-worth, many people drawn
to the arts, the helping professions, full-time activism, or
other similarly low-paying fields turn instead to more secure
career paths. Perhaps, too, it is the endless array of choices
in modern middle-class culture along with the "be all you
can be" ethos imbued in us since childhood. With so much
freedom and so many options, how can you possibly know you were
meant to follow this path rather than that one?
But some thinkers contend that we are each born with a seed
of destiny, and that our task in life is to nurture this calling
to fruition. People who ignore this inner urging and choose
their work in the world on the basis of a prestigious position,
a fat salary, or just chance may eventually suffer an inner
crisis. According to James Hillman, the original meaning of
the word happiness stems from the Greek eudaimonia: the deep
satisfaction that comes from keeping faith with the soul’s
purpose. The philosopher Plato imagined people’s higher
calling as an invisible daimon, or spirit companion, that accompanied
them throughout life as the voice of their unique talent or
purpose.
In his seminal work Freedom and Destiny, published in 1981,
existential psychologist Rollo May grappled with the link between
the seemingly opposing forces of fate and free will. Countering
the pervasive American belief that people can be anything they
want to be, May concluded that true freedom comes only when
we accept the form of our fate. "Destiny sets limits for
us physically, psychologically, [and] culturally, and equips
us with certain talents," he writes. Confronting these
inborn limits and assets, he writes, allows us to find satisfaction.
"Those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting
the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable
of pleasure and joy." The secret power that comes from
accepting our inborn nature is what psychologist Carl Jung meant
when he said, "Free will is the ability to do gladly that
which I must do."
OVER THE YEARS, I have watched the forces of fate play out in
the lives of my children. My oldest son, always a gifted student
and passionate advocate of what he believes in, is a graduate
student at Yale, working toward a doctorate in ecology. My middle
son’s anxious nights pondering life from this or that
angle foretold his college studies in philosophy, while his
teenage desire to start a rare wine collection prefigured his
recent decision to publish his own local magazine, Dining Out.
And then there is my youngest son, who, when he was only 8 years
old, used to draw up elaborate diet plans and exercise schedules.
As much as I tried to fit him into an academic mold, his spirit
refused. Today he wants to be a boxer—a decision that
initially upset my politically correct notions of what a life
calling should look like. But as I watch him happily shadow-boxing
around the house, and listen to his blow-by-blow accounts of
sparring matches at the Washington, D.C. boxing gym where he
trains, there is no denying the deep contentment that comes
from pursuing what he loves best—and I can only admire
him for listening to the voice of his heart.
In fact, all the advice from experts in numerous fields about
finding your calling can be summed up in the famous (and now
almost clichéd) dictum to "follow your bliss,"
voiced by the great mythologist Joseph Campbell. Not bliss as
the kind of easy pleasure that comes from lounging around a
pool sipping tropical drinks or staying in bed all day watching
television. Rather, it is the inner well-being that arises from
doing something that you were born to do. Often, this means
more sacrifice and hard work than careers that do not involve
a sense of calling. Zuleikha, a Sante Fe–based dancer
and multicultural storyteller, says that all her life, dancing
has been that place where "everything lines up in my body
and I feel part of a greater mystery." So strong is her
calling to dance that it’s "pushed through all the
darkness and doubt and fear" that comes from the difficult
struggle to support herself as an artist. Lawrence Hillman,
who with Donna Spencer authored Alignments: How to Live Life
in Harmony with the Universe (Lantern Books, 2002), says that
"following your heart is not the same as following your
ego." The soul, says Hillman, who gave up a career in architecture
to heed the call to become an astrologer, "longs to get
up and stretch, to explore and learn" rather than doing
what feels most comfortable.
Attending to the voice of the soul rather than the needs of
the ego means learning to distinguish between the "social
self" and the "essential self," according to
career counselor Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Own North
Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (Crown, 2001).
The "social self" learns early to adapt to the expectations
of society. The "essential self," on the other hand,
is made up of the core desires a person is born with. Only in
people who are very lucky or especially wise, she writes, "do
the social and essential selves always agree that they’re
playing for the same team. For the rest of us, internal conflict
is a way of life." Ironically, says Beck, those who pursue
their heart’s path are more likely to excel in today’s
constantly changing economic environment. Following the rules
may have worked for previous generations, but, she believes,
the key to economic survival today lies more in the flexible
skills and unique passions of the creative and unorthodox essential
self than in the more conformist social self.
Often, a calling is not so much a track to a particular profession
as it is a commitment to a core set of talents and values (what
Caroline Myss calls "archetypal patterns") that express
themselves in a variety of ways over a lifetime. This may mean
a career, a way of life, or a creative pursuit. Identifying
these elements within us, Myss says, "can awaken in us
our own divine potential" and become a source of emotional,
spiritual, and physical power. While a calling can certainly
inspire us in our choice of a profession, it is less often a
job than it is an area of life that we are called to explore—the
postal worker who delves into Eastern mysticism, for example,
or the businessperson who is deeply involved in civic or philanthropic
activities. The soul we put into what we do transforms the ordinary
into the extraordinary. A life well lived, with responsibility
to loved ones and community, the care given to eating, homemaking,
and other ordinary tasks of everyday life, and heartfelt commitment
to a profession that may never go beyond the middle rungs of
success can all create the deep satisfaction that comes from
living life as its own calling.
It can take decades before a calling becomes clear. This is
especially true for those who are born with a multitude of talents.
Nearing 40, Goethe, the giant of German literature, could be
found wandering through Italy, asking himself, "Am I poet,
artist, or scientist?" Likewise, the renowned psychologist
William James intended to become an artist, shifted to science,
then moved to biology and medicine, settling upon psychology
and philosophy. Some contend that a true calling emerges only
after midlife. Indeed, given the length of modern-day life spans,
even if we have picked the right career in the first half of
our lives, we might be ready for something new.
At any stage in life, though, finding and following one’s
calling can be a constantly recurring issue, as we struggle
to define our truest self. The word vocation comes from the
same Latin root vox or "voice," and vocare, "to
call." To pick out the true voice of our calling from the
increasingly noisy din of cultural and familial voices requires
fine-tuning the listening skills of our innermost being. But
because we can never be entirely sure, finding a calling sometimes
means risking a wrong step that ultimately might lead in the
right direction.
Sometimes, the only way to find your calling is just to jump
into the river of life and swim with the currents. Whether we
achieve success or fail miserably, clarity comes only with action.
Knowledge of oneself, it seems, arises only in retrospect. "To
be continually preoccupied with one’s destiny," writes
Rollo May, "is also a way of escaping living it out. A
sense of abandon is necessary, a sense of throwing oneself into
one’s calling."
For in the end, each person’s calling is a path unto itself,
one North Star twinkling among a billion other lights in the
sky.
Though she still rents and hasn’t yet managed to master
the stock market, Pythia Peay finds lasting happiness in her
work as a writer on spiritual topics. She is the author of Soul
Sisters: The Five Sacred Qualities of a Woman’s Soul (Tarcher/Putnam,
2002) and lives near Washington, D.C.
Back to Top
Politics
on the Couch
July/August
2001
By Pythia Peay, George
"I
can’t stop thinking about their faces," says a distraught
44-year-old woman to her therapist as her weekly session begins.
"This morning, I passed a homeless woman and her daughter
on the street. Where will they go? What if someone steals the
money I gave them?"
It is a delicate moment for someone who has struggled with depression
for more than a year. Many therapists would have quickly steered
her away from the outer world of social suffering toward the
innerscape of family complexes, but psychologist Lane Gerber
of Seattle University encourages his client to confront the
turbulent feelings stirred up by the street encounter. He explains
that he considers her strong reaction to be just as meaningful
as any emotional responses she might have to her parents or
her children. During subsequent sessions, Gerber and the client
explore the ties between the personal world and the political
sphere. He points out the parallel between her frustration that
no one ever listens to her and the homeless woman’s invisibility.
But rather than just highlighting the symbolic similarities
between her and the homeless woman, however, Gerber gives equal
weight to the client’s concern for the plight of the homeless.
This twin perspective helps bridge the gap between his client’s
inner world and the wider role she must play as a citizen. Indeed,
over time, Gerber says his client not only finds her individual
voice but becomes a community activist for homeless people in
her town.
Most psychologists (and their clients) assume that sociopolitical
concerns should be checked at a therapist’s door. As one
woman says, "Why should I spend $100 an hour discussing
welfare reform?" But Gerber and other "political psychologists"
believe this division is artificial and may even contribute
to people’s feelings of loneliness and alienation—the
very problems therapy so often seeks to cure. In a world beset
by environmental destruction, ethnic strife, and economic injustice,
the notion that personal suffering is related only to one’s
childhood can seem naive.
Though people have been using psychological insight to understand
political matters for some time, examining the political dimensions
of pyschological well-being is less common. Andrew Samuels,
a professor of analytical psychology at the University of Essex
in England, notes: "The way we [psychologists] are all
trained is that if the client talks about the famine in Africa,
you’re supposed to explore the depriving, absent breast—or
something like that."
It was during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 that Samuels, author
of Politics on the Couch (Other Press/Karnac, 2001), began changing
the way he practices therapy. He noticed more patients bringing
in war-inspired dreams, fantasies, and visceral reactions like
disgust or fear. While some clients were using Saddam Hussein
as a means to talk about their father, just as many "were
talking about their father when what they really wanted to talk
about was Saddam Hussein," he says.
Over time, Samuels realized how many of his clients were dramatically
affected by large-scale political events. Our reactions to the
Holocaust, the Oklahoma City bombing, and even the death of
Princess Diana have taught us that human beings are shaped not
only by their parents or early-childhood traumas but also by
the epic triumphs and tragedies of their era. By honoring rather
than dismissing his clients’ gut-level reactions to such
crises, Samuels also began to notice that they would "reveal
their most passionate political convictions that they’d
held for a long time but were like guilty secrets." He
theorized that in addition to sexual, moral, intellectual, and
spiritual energy, "political energy flowed through the
veins of human beings."
Samuels and other political psychologists believe that people
can suffer as much from an inability to find their role in the
larger body politic as from other personal problems. Asking
the kinds of questions therapists typically use to deepen their
patients’ self-knowledge, but with an eye to the political—such
as "What was your first political memory?" or "How
did your family history shape your political perspective?"—
was one way, they discovered, that individuals could begin to
liberate their innate political instincts.
Overcoming passivity in order to bring about change in one’s
life and the surrounding world, says Diane Perlman, a clinical
psychologist in the Philadelphia area, is a key component in
maintaining psychological health. Perlman posits that just as
we have a sex drive or libido, so too is there an instinctive
drive for truth and justice—what she has termed "verido."
As more psychotherapists address the split between citizens
and the political sphere, perhaps they will not only empower
their clients but also help to heal the ailing body politic.
Pythia
Peay is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She is the author
of Soul Sisters: A Sacred Way for Women, to be published by
Tarcher/Putnam in spring 2002. Her article "Soul Searching:
How to Uncover the Unique Spirit of your Hometown," was
featured in our Jan./Feb. 2001 cover story. From George (Sept.
1998).
Do
politics and therapy mix? Discuss in the Society forum at Cafe
Utne: cafe.utne.com
Back to Top
Soul
Searching
January/February
2001
By Pythia Peay
Does
your hometown have a soul? If you can define the character of
your town, maybe you can keep it intact.
How to uncover—and nurture—the unique spirit of
your hometown
I was the proverbial small-town girl, raised in Oak Grove, Missouri.
While my friends looked forward to marriage and career, I yearned
for big cities. It was a dream that cast my fate and, since
leaving home 30 years ago, I have lived in or near five American
cities. As much as any intimate tie to friend or family, each
of these places has shaped my character. To Kansas City and
St. Louis I owe my ability to stay grounded; to San Francisco,
my impulse to seek out life’s edge; to Santa Fe, my reliance
on imagination.
But it is to Washington, D.C., the metropolis where I finally
settled 14 years ago, that I owe a part of my soul. Transplanted
from the subtle-hued desert of Santa Fe to the highly charged
atmosphere of the nation’s capital, I felt turmoil within
myself and dreamed of going mad. With time, however, the special
charm of the place—the poetry of the passing seasons and
the spirit of American history that sighs invisibly through
the air—opened my heart. "As soon as man has stopped
wandering and stood still and looked about him," wrote
the American author Eudora Welty, "he found a God in that
place." And I did, too.
The idea that cities possess a soul was common among the ancients.
The Romans spoke of "genius loci," meaning the special
spirit of a place. Indeed, until the 18th-century Enlightenment,
when the sacred was severed from the secular in Western culture,
cities were often built on foundations of myth and religion,
and were thought to be watched over by gods and goddesses, nature
spirits, saints, and angels. Belief in a city’s mysteriously
personal character lives on in the colorful images that arise
when we think of certain places: Los Angeles is the city of
angels and dreams of stardom. New Orleans is jazz and black
magic. Boulder is breathtaking mountain views and spiritual
exploration. Boston, founded by austere Puritans, is symbolized
by the lowly bean. Even when they’re repeated ad nauseam
in travel brochures, these images connect us with the underground
wells of myth that water a city’s soul.
But does anyone today really care about the souls of our cities?
Like giant urban gods fallen from their pedestals, they lie
dying of neglect, buried beneath asphalt and artless architecture,
crushed by the weight of overwhelming social problems, their
inhabitants often blind to the fact that their own souls are
shaped, for better or worse, within the city’s larger
reality. We ignore the magic of a place—hidden beyond
the real estate deals, the political squabbles, and numbing
commutes—at our own peril.
I embarked on my own quest to uncover the soul of Washington,
D.C., as a way to quell my distress after moving here. It dawned
on me recently that if I can succeed in a city renowned for
its hollow-hearted power-mongering and inside-the-beltway narcissism,
then anyone anywhere could do the same. Here are a few methods
to help unearth the soul of your hometown, based on my own exploration
and conversations with thinkers around the country as well as
with Washington historians, artists, mapmakers, poets, and activists.
Some may sound deceptively simple, but beware: As your perceptions
are transformed, you may find yourself living in a city wholly
transformed.
Unearth the original landscape
The essence of a place is closely tied to its landscape. According
to Gail Thomas, director of the Dallas Institute for Humanities
and Culture, who studies the connection between soul and cities,
settlers initially were attracted to a site by some remarkable
natural feature—the way the wind blows, or the abundance
of good underground water. Kansas City, for example, was founded
on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River that explorers
Lewis and Clark trumpeted as an ideal location for a fort. But
even though a city’s topography may have been obscured
by development, maps and history books may offer a vivid image
of how it once looked.
I was inspired to learn from a mapmaker how Washington’s
landscape resembled the very principle of unity out of diversity
that is the city’s—and the nation’s—foundation.
It is a geographical crossroads where the flora and fauna of
the North and the South intermingle, maples growing alongside
magnolias. Most surprising to me was learning that Washington,
so often described as a swamp, is predominantly a city of river
terraces and hills. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who
has thought deeply about the ties between soul and city for
more than two decades, sees significance in the way the swamp
image has found its way into Washington’s cultural imagination.
He calls it a psychologically apt metaphor that captures the
way our politicians’ ideals inevitably become bogged down
by less noble realities.
Steep
yourself in history
Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul, writes that reflecting
on the past is an important part of retrieving your soul. Just
as individuals in therapy or on a spiritual search discern new
patterns of meaning by revisiting what they’ve experienced,
so, too, does a city’s history reveal something of its
intrinsic nature.
To know that the poet Walt Whitman once walked the streets of
Capitol Hill after tending wounded Civil War soldiers housed
in the Patent Office Building, and that the banks of the Anacostia
River were lined for 3,000 years with settlements of the Nacotchtank
Indians, opened my heart to the ghosts of the past still haunting
its modern spaces.
Stoke your imagination
In some way, great cities are created by the artists who render
them immortal as much as by the planners, construction workers,
and business leaders who build them. Think of James Joyce’s
Dublin, impressionist painter Camille Pissarro’s Paris,
or even Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park. Washington came
magically alive when I saw it through the eyes of artist Renee
Butler, who showed me slides of the city’s trees printed
on large screens to express the way their lacy-leafed branches
evoke the sacred. Delving into the works of local poets, fiction
writers, columnists, memoirists, painters, photographers, folk
artists, and songwriters deepens how we experience our home,
imbuing commonplace reality with awareness, appreciation, and
perhaps wonder.
Find
the heart of town
Ask your friends this question: Where do you go to find the
true heart of the city? In Seattle, many would say Pike’s
Place Market. In Chicago, Wrigley Field. In Madison, the lakeside
beer garden at the University of Wisconsin student union. Most
of the people I interviewed in Washington, D.C., located the
city’s soul not in the famous monuments and museums but
in neighborhood streets, cafés, bookstores. John Johnson,
founder of Process WorkD.C.–a multicultural group that
meets to discuss race and class issues–took me on a tour
of his favorite spots: a tucked-away Cheers-style café
near Capitol Hill that is frequented by activists, a baseball
field where Hispanic families gather on Sundays for games and
picnics. Others cited Kramer’s Books and Afterwords, the
popular Dupont Circle hangout, or ethnic restaurants with atmosphere
and inexpensive menus.
Nearly everyone finds at least a slice of the city’s soul
in Washington’s surprising wealth of parks and natural
areas. I expect you’d find the same in San Francisco,
where many people connect with their city’s soul in Golden
Gate Park or on the winding trails of Mount Tamalpais, the gentle
mountain rising up out of the ocean mists north of the Golden
Gate Bridge.
Discover
the civic wound that needs healing
All cities have problems, though they are often unacknowledged.
While it’s usually difficult and politically risky to
draw attention to shortcomings, especially in a place that prides
itself on being a city that "works," ignoring them
perpetuates a state of soullessness. In Santa Fe, for example,
conflicts arise between the economic bonanza of tourism and
its rich historic, Hispanic character. The influx of wealthy
Anglos purchasing vacation homes has come at the expense of
indigenous residents—the Native Americans and Spanish—who
can no longer afford to live where their grandparents and great-grandparents
lived.
Race, of course, is an issue affecting most American cities.
Almost every person I’ve talked with in Washington mourns
the racial divide between blacks and whites; some people describe
it as a city of "two souls." To drive past abandoned
buildings with the U.S. Capitol looming in the background, to
see how dramatically the pollution-choked Anacostia River contrasts
with the cleaner, suburban Potomac River, is to witness a visible
tear in the city’s soul.
Volunteering at a shelter for the homeless, throwing yourself
into a political reform movement, getting to know down-and-out
neighborhoods, speaking out about community ills all can help
you find the soul of your hometown, as well as contribute to
healing it.
Find where people come together
The polis, wrote Hannah Arendt, arises out of people acting
and speaking together in a "sharing of words and deeds."
Thus the living force of a city’s soul is most palpable
in those large physical spaces—the commons—where
the people of a city come together to celebrate, to protest,
or simply to enjoy a Sunday afternoon. As a veteran of the anti-war
movement, I fondly recall the boisterous rallies held in Kansas
City’s Volker Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Park. The first place I ever felt the true beat of Washington,
D.C., was at the Georgetown Flea Market, an open-air bazaar
where people from every corner of the city come each Sunday
to barter with vendors for produce and craftwork.
Washington, of course, is the city where the rest of the country
comes to make its voice heard. The open rectangle of green grass
on the Mall is one of the most powerful outdoor public spaces
in the modern world. It’s where Martin Luther King gave
his "I Have a Dream" speech and the destination for
protesters about abortion, gun control, foreign policy, and
countless other causes. Yet I’ve also enjoyed spring days
strolling along the Mall while my kids clamor to pet someone’s
dog.
Take note of outdoor spaces where people gather to share in
the ordinariness of life and, in being together, keep city life
vibrant. More than the physical landscape or architectural design
of a city, it is people, individually and collectively, who
are the true force that enlivens and empowers a place.
Ironically, commitment to saving the souls of our cities might
lead to greater protection of wilderness. As James Hillman has
frequently pointed out, Americans tend to see their cities as
the place where the innocent become corrupted and where soul
is lost, rather than found. He has argued passionately on behalf
of reversing this trend, thus protecting nature from too much
human contact and reanimating our cities from within. For to
seek soul only in nature, or within ourselves, is to miss the
wondrous natural creation that is a city—a convergence
of community, commerce, street life, history, nature, geography,
politics, art, and people that offers a perpetually renewing
source of life.
Pythia Peay is a writer based in Washington, D.C., where she
receives regular doses of inspiration from the Georgetown Flea
Market and the Potomac River. Her book on feminine spirituality,
Soul Sisters: A Sacred Way for All Women, will be published
this year by Tarcher/Putnam. Some of the material in this article
is adapted from
Washingtonian www.washingtonian.com
Back to Top
Enduring
bonds based on spirituality, some say
By PYTHIA PEAY
Religion News Service
Shimmering
with the seductive gossamer of romance, Valentine's Day celebrates
sweethearts everywhere. Long-stemmed roses; extravagant boxes
of chocolate truffles; vermillion cards inscribed with flowery
endearments; and lacy, racy gifts are among the tokens of intimate
affection that will be exchanged among love-struck couples this
Feb. 14.
But what of the lonely hearts who have yet to meet their fated
other half? Or long-married couples for whom such enchantment
is but a faded memory? For them, it is worth asking whether
there are other kinds of intimate relationships equal to romantic
passion.
Aristotle, for example, distinguished between "eros,"
or fleeting passion, and "philia," or friendship of
a more enduring nature. Indeed, several contemporary thinkers
agree that giddy infatuation may excite the body and intoxicate
the senses, but a relationship based on the deeper side of life
- whether between lovers or close companions - awakens the spirit
and transcends problems in a way romantic passion rarely achieves.
According to Jan Clanton Collins, a Jungian analyst who teaches
anthropology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, friends
who are steadfast companions on the spiritual pilgrimage "are
a grace that make the journey worthwhile. Just to know that
they (friends) are in the world and that we are not alone gives
us courage to go on."
Describing her own years-long relationship with two close female
friends who share her spiritual quest, Collins said, "We
feel as if we have known each other for centuries, as if we
picked up a conversation that we had already been having.
"In their presence, I can totally relax and be myself."
Nancy Kadian, a 48-year-old psychotherapist who lives in Chevy
Chase, Md., describes a similar connection to her best friend,
Claudette.
"She's been a soul sister since I first laid eyes on her
at 13. It felt so deep, as if we came into this world knowing
each other," she said.
There is a Celtic phrase for such profound kinship, said Irish
Catholic scholar John O'Donohue: " 'Anam cara,' or soul
friend."
The author of a book by the same name, "Anam Cara: A Book
of Celtic Wisdom" (HarperCollins), O'Donohue said such
instantaneous connections are rooted in "an ancient recognition"
between two souls.
Once such a link is forged, he said, "no outside force
in space or time can diminish or break it. There is commitment,
affection, a sense of destiny and a sense of the divine."
Looking back over his own life, O'Donohue recalled that during
times of great difficulty and significant moments of transition,
he "wouldn't have made it without the supportive healing
of deep friendships."
Part of the role of one's anam cara, he said, "is to see
for you in places where you're blind. There is a secret destiny
in every friendship that awakens the hidden possibilities asleep
in people's hearts. Thus, part of the magic of anam cara is
that the human psyche is given to each individual, but it remains
relatively unborn - friendship helps you to birth yourself."
Collins concurs, saying one of the markers of a genuine soul
friendship is the "sense of looking into a mirror that
reflects something of our soul back to us."
For though such bonds may include the usual gossip and events
of daily life, they are rooted in a earch for deeper meaning.
"We talk about God all the time," Kadian said of her
own deep bond with her friend. "I can talk to Claudette
about God the way I can't with anybody else. It's so private
and intimate. It would be embarrassing with someone who didn't
know me the way she does."
If soul friendships help to deepen faith and endure hardships,
spiritual sharing between partners may be the alchemy that makes
romantic love last, transforming the dross of an ordinary relationship
into a golden bond that endures forever.
The problem, said Mark Waldman, a Los Angeles psychotherapist
who works with many couples, is that "over and over again,
I find that most couples don't talk to each other" about
their spiritual values.
Waldman, who is the editor of "Staying Together: Embracing
Love, Intimacy and Spirit" (Tarcher), said men and women
"tend to pick mates based on how they look: what they see
and sense and smell. This is not conscious; it's biological,
about making babies and surviving."
However much rooted in the natural order of things these magnetic
attractions may be, Waldman said, eventually "the chemistry
wears off."
Then, he said, couples are faced with building a meaningful
relationship, "as chemical attractions blind us to the
types of questions and issues that are necessary to form long-term
relationships."
Such problems could be prevented, Waldman said.
"If two people consciously explored their spiritual beliefs
and yearnings with each other on the first, second or third
date - one's innermost feelings, the world and what gives life
meaning - then the type of relationship that would open up would
be more intimate and honest than if it was based on physical
attraction," he said.
Making soul friendship the basis for a love relationship does
not stop with sorting through initial differences, but requires
a commitment to a process that deepens over time, Waldman said.
Weaving spirituality into the dating ritual is especially important
today, said Waldman, because we live in a society "where
people change churches and religions rather rapidly, and where
each individual has quietly formed their own spiritual orientation.
"It's not like it used to be, when a person usually married
someone from the same religious background."
"Every time you ask your partner what they spiritually
believe in," said Waldman, "the answer is going to
be somewhat different, as we evolve, as our life experiences
change.
"Most of us don't realize that if we don't continually
share our journey with the people we love, we'll continue to
repeat the spirituality of an 8- or 10-year-old."
Back to Top
Singing
the Soul Home
Overtone Chanting and Classical Music, Drumbeats
and Vocalizations are all Proving to be
Sound Healing Methods
By Pythia Peay
When
I recall my first meditation camp, memories come flooding back
on waves of sound. Once again I hear the sweet strumming of
a zither player intoning the wake-up call to prayer; the rustle
of meditators gathering at dawn; the whirring of insects and
chirping of birds that rose in pitch with the morning sun; and
the ancient, mystical sound vibrations the Sufi teacher Pir
Vilayat Inayat Khan conjured up. As he led the group in a litany
of chants praising the divine attributes of God, guided us in
meditation to the otherworldly tones of monks' voices on an
outdoor sound system, and led a worship service that rang out
in jubilation with the songs and prayers of the world's religions,
my soul was sung awake. It would be years before I fully integrated
the wisdom I heard from that long-ago retreat. Yet the balm
of the chants, meditative silences, and communal singing penetrated
deeply, evoking an immutable tranquility and initiating in me
a lifelong commitment to the spiritual journey.
Indeed, Pir Vilayat -- like teachers of many other faiths --
is part of a continuum of mystical traditions that utilize sound
as a technique to transform human consciousness. With repetitive
percussive beats or the chanting of sacred songs or syllables,
Native American shamans, Hindu sages, Tibetan monks, Christian
contemplatives, Jewish mystics, and Sufi dervishes have been
able to induce states of religious ecstacy, profound peace,
and divine bliss. So powerful are the effects of sound and music
that they could be said to be among humankind's most potent
forms of soul medicine. With the right guidance and focused
intention, sacred sound technologies have the power to propel
spiritual explorers to the farthest reaches of inner space.
But as growing numbers of people are re-discovering, states
of consciousness elicited by sound do more than nourish and
mend the soul. The deep relaxation and positive feelings that
are engendered can also treat physical illness and depression.
Thus, along with other timeless techniques like meditation,
sound and music are being increasingly utilized as potent sources
of healing. Like a surging river or gusting wind, say holistic
practitioners, vibratory currents of sound are forces of nature
harnessed since time immemorial by healers to cure and soothe
the sick and wounded.
Sound's awesome power is evidenced by the world's myths and
religious traditions that describe vibration as the very stuff
of creation. In fact, if a growing cadre of sound healers, music
therapists, medical doctors, holistic pioneers, and composers
have their way, "sound medicine" will soon be one
more alternative healing addition to the mainstream medical
bag. It is a field bursting with creative innovation and cultural
cross-pollination, says editor Michael Taft of Sounds True,
an audiotape and recording company in Boulder, Colorado. Musicians
record esoteric forms of "overtoning" in state-of-the
art sound studios, making them available to the general public.
Music therapists sift through thousands of recordings of classical
and modern music, listening for exactly the right piece to help
patients release buried emotions. "Psychoacoustic engineers"
-- the new science that studies the effects of sound on consciousness—create
"beat frequencies" designed to stimulate certain brainwave
patterns, such as those found in heightened states of mental
activity or deep meditation. Ethno-musicologists travel the
world recording ancient indigenous healing music; composers
create original compositions to be used in healing specific
diseases, such as AIDS or depression; and sound healers work
to liberate the "true note" within each person.
To make sense of the many forms of sonic therapy, it helps to
understand some of the fundamental ideas at work in this emerging
branch of energy medicine. For proof that sound impacts matter,
many healers cite experiments conducted by the Swiss scientist
Hans Jenny. In his classic film "Cymatics," Jenny
placed various types of materials, such as iron filings, molten
plastic, oils, and wood pulp on a surface and then vibrated
them with various tones and frequencies. The result: diamond-shaped
mandalas, geometric spheres, and other intricate patterns. "When
you see these films," says healing composer Kay Gardner,
author of Sounding the Inner Landscape: Music as Medicine, "you
realize that music has an organizing effect and that the same
thing could be happening in our bodies." In other words,
sound can encourage, support, and create harmony and balance.
When trying to explain how sound heals, many sound experts also
refer to the work of French physician Alfred Tomatis, M.D.,
sometimes referred to as the "Einstein of sound."
It was Tomatis who recognized the function of the ear and the
importance of listening in maintaining the body's equilibrium
and central nervous system's proper functioning. Believing that
disorders ranging from learning disabilities to autism could
be cured by learning to listen more actively, he invented the
"electronic ear." This device utilizes specially filtered
high-frequency sounds that, when listened to through headphones,
help to retrain the ear, thus charging the central nervous system
and the cortex of the brain.
Additionally, research conducted by Melinda Maxfield, Ph.D.,
who specializes in cross-cultural healthcare, shows how various
rhythmic drumbeats—such as those used by shamans—transmit
sound frequencies along nerve pathways in the brain. She reports
that results from pilot projects that she has initiated with
stroke victims and dyslexia and attention deficit disorder patients
suggest "that percussion can shift brain waves from the
more rational beta state to slower alpha and theta states where
hypnagogic imagery, guidance, and sudden insights arise that
can facilitate the healing process."
But while sound therapy is being used with increasing frequency
by many in the alternative health movement—from massage
therapists to medical doctors to voice teachers— some
experts say there is a need to clarify its role as a healing
modality.
Mitchell Gaynor, M.D., director of medical oncology and the
Integrative Medicine Program at the Strang Cancer Prevention
Center in New York City, stresses that mind/body techniques
that utilize breath and sound are not meant to replace conventional
medical interventions, but to complement them. "A lot of
people think that they have to choose between complementary
and mainstream forms of medicine. But it's not an either/or
thing—the two are not mutually exclusive."
For music therapist Barbara J. Crowe, a professor at Arizona
State University in Tempe, what matters is that practitioners
know the difference between sound healing and music therapy.
Sound healing, she says, "is a looser amalgamation of approaches
that looks at sound as a more direct curative agent than a music
therapist might see it." In music therapy, however, Crowe
says, music is "an equal partner with interpersonal therapeutic
interaction. It has been in existence since 1950, and has a
code-of-ethics, standards of practice, and credentials."
In the music therapy field, healing occurs primarily through
listening and playing music. In actual practice, however, practitioners
more often than not draw from both traditions, using sound and
music interchangeably.
Yet whether one uses sound healing, music therapy, or a combination
of the two methods, there appears to be one core principle at
work: the restoration of health and well-being through rhythm,
balance, and harmony. For as the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat
Khan, an accomplished Indian musician whose mystical teachings
on the topic have influenced both his son Pir Vilayat as well
as the current generation of sound healers, once wrote: "Whether
it is nervous illness, mental disorder, or physical illness,
at the root of all these different aspects of illness there
is one cause, and that cause is inharmony."
Healing the Body
In her vision of the drugstore of the future, composer Kay Gardner
envisions patients being able "to pick out a [piece of
music] instead of a pill. They will go into a special section,
where there will be different pieces of music for different
illnesses." Adds Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect®,
"I believe the prescriptive method of ‘take the color
yellow and a big dose of C sharp'" will soon be no different
from conventional pharmaceutical prescriptions. Indeed, in an
age of managed care when individuals need to find their own
"usable tools," Campbell says, music is "on the
forefront for use in rehabilitation, stress reduction, strokes,
high blood pressure, and the release of emotional complexes."
If it sounds like the proverbial magic bullet, he says -- "It
is."
While the medical establishment awaits further hard evidence
from controlled studies before confirming music's curative powers,
some physicians are already using it as a complementary healing
method. Gaynor recently completed a book titled Sounds of Healing:
A Physician Reveals the Secret Power of Sound, Voice, and Music,
based on his work with cancer patients. "What is important,"
he says, "is to view patients in their wholeness and to
reestablish a harmony between mind and body and spirit—that's
really the goal of sound healing. Disease is a form of disharmony.
Even with cancer, there is a lack of rhythm of cells not knowing
when to stop growing or dividing."
Thus, twice a month Gaynor leads support groups in which he
teaches cancer patients how to use voice and tone, combined
with imagery. Working with Tibetan "singing" bowls—brass
bowls that emit sonorous, reverberating overtones when struck—as
well as quartz crystal bowls and mantras from the Hindu yoga
tradition, he helps patients move into states of relaxation
that slow brain-wave patterns and alter states of consciousness.
From this vantage point, patients can connect to their souls
or higher selves, gaining a "healing perspective"
that can give them the courage they need to confront difficult
aspects of their illness. Re-establishing connection with one's
inner essence is very important, adds Gaynor, because "when
you're in that place you can't be afraid. And the most painful
part of cancer patients' disease is the tidal wave of fear that
overcomes them around undergoing chemotherapy, losing their
hair...dying and the anguish about being separated from their
children." Studies show, for instance, that there is a
strong correlation between negative emotions such as stress,
pessimism, and anxiety and a depressed immune system. Gaynor
points to studies that show that "music positively affects
various immune parameters."
Gaynor tells the story of a young woman with Hodgkin's disease
who suffered from such severe "anticipatory nausea,"
getting so sick hours before her appointed time for chemotherapy
that she began to refuse treatment. After using Tibetan bowls
and other mind-body meditative techniques, "her fear and
nausea were replaced by an amazing peacefulness. The chemotherapy
had been a reminder that she might die; she was afraid that
there might not be a tomorrow. But as a result of her sound
meditations, she came to the realization that tomorrow was just
a mental construct, and that it was possible to live one day
at a time." Most importantly, she was able to continue
with her treatments that would help her live through many tomorrows.
To sound healer Jonathan Goldman, author of Healing Sounds:
The Power of Harmonics, music's ability to ease physical pain
stems from its ability to transform matter at a vibrational
level. "Scientists are now validating what mystics have
always known—that everything in creation is in a state
of vibration and motion." When the body is in a state of
perfect health, Goldman says, "every organ, bone, and tissue
is putting out an extraordinary harmonic. If you picture the
body as an orchestra that is playing in tune—what happens
when the second violin begins to play out of harmony because
it lost its sheet music? Eventually, the rest of the orchestra
begins to sound off.
To continue the metaphor, that part of the body that is vibrating
out-of-tune is where the ‘disease' is located." Thus,
to Goldman, the basic principle of sound healing is to "restore
that which is vibrating out of harmony back to its natural healthy
frequency."
Working with ancient vowel sounds that correspond to the body's
chakra system— such as "aaahhh" for the heart
center— Goldman teaches people to resonate different parts
of their body's subtle energy field and to use sound to move
energy where it has become "stuck."
Goldman cautions, however, that sound alone doesn't work unless
accompanied by "intention," the focused consciousness
a person brings to his or her voice.
Although Goldman is reluctant to make claims about sound's power
to heal, he says that students of his have "reported remarkable
occurrences, such as shrinkages of tumors after an overtoning
session. One nurse reported that a woman scheduled to undergo
a kidney stone operation surprised her doctors when she was
found, after an overtoning session by the nurse, to be free
of problems."
Music's ability to heal by bringing order out of chaos is strikingly
evident in the cases of late-stage Alzheimer's patients. Certain
songs, for example, may penetrate the husk of individuals suffering
from Alzheimer's disease, activating their memories and returning
them momentarily to their personalities. Barbara Crowe tells
the story of visiting a nursing home in Buffalo, where she and
a colleague asked nurses to bring them their worst patient.
"We could hear her coming down the hall, ranting and swearing,"
she recalls. "My colleague tried handing her an instrument
and she began hitting him with it. Then he picked up his guitar
and began strumming ‘You're a Grand Old Flag.' Suddenly
her behavior switched and she began laughing and playing her
instrument. The whole staff burst into tears; they had never
seen this woman do anything but scream in terror."
While music therapists rely on popular songs to stimulate memory,
musician Kay Gardner composes pieces for specific diseases,
such as AIDS. Using various instruments, she musically duplicates
the pulses, brain waves, and breath cycles of the body. "Because
so many people with AIDS have pneumonia or lung problems,"
she explains, "I wrote in F sharp, which touches the chest
area, using instruments like the cello and kettle drum that
use the rhythm of the heartbeat."
Music therapist Pat Moffitt-Cook, who has travelled the globe
researching and recording indigenous healing music for use by
Western healthcare professionals, says Gardner is continuing
a tradition that is millenniums-old. In India, for instance,
there exist mantras for specific diseases like arthritis, smallpox,
blindness, infertility, and senility. She cites a North Indian
healer whose "musical repertoire is made up of devotional
songs and secret mantras that are sung out loud, or repeated
silently and blown out through the breath onto the patient.
To him that is the injection of a sound remedy into the body
or mind of the person who is suffering." So potent is the
"live sound of a thousand-year old remedy," practiced
by Babaji (the Hindi term for healer), says Moffitt-Cook, that
she has witnessed extraordinary healing events such as a crippled
woman getting up and walking, and a man with severe mental illness
returning to his community restored to balance.
Healing the Mind and Emotions
As most music lovers can attest, compositions as varied as the
sentimental movie score "Love Story" and Beethoven's
"Ode to Joy" have the ability to release buried emotions,
evoking tears of despair or sublime joy. It is this simple magic
that makes music a natural medicine for the psychological healing
process. For instance, Julia Cameron, author of The Vein of
Gold and other books on creativity, tells of her own encounter
with the power of sound to heal grief. In a session with a sound
healer, she recalls, she was asked to identify where she was
stuck emotionally. "I thought, ‘I love my mother
and I never weep. I have not wept about her death.' I was then
asked to think about my mother and start making sounds. Within
minutes I was weeping and in touch with the beauty of my mother
and that relationship." Years later when her father died,
Cameron says, "I immediately took to the land, singing
through my father's death." Like the keening and wailing
of the bereaved around the world, Cameron had tapped into her
voice to release suffering.
In the same way that Cameron used singing as a unique kind of
sonic therapy to cope with her parent's deaths so, too, do music
therapists and sound healers use auditory tools to ease emotional
pain and release psychological blocks. Perhaps the best-known
form of music therapy is Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). It
was created by Helen Bonny 25 years ago and originated out of
her work with transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center during the early 1970s.
Her experience working as a music specialist with cancer patients
undergoing LSD sessions triggered her awareness of the connection
between healing images and altered states of consciousness,
as well as the concept that music was a "powerful way to
get into deeper emotions."
A typical GIM session, Bonny explains, begins with the therapist
taking down the client's personal history. This is followed
by a relaxation exercise and then, based on the client's personal
issues, the therapist selects music from among 25 different
programs Bonny has created. As they listen to the music, clients
are encouraged to verbalize the images as they arise from the
unconscious. "After a while," Bonny says, "the
music drops away and people don't listen as much to the music
as to the images themselves. Music raises the emotions, the
emotions give rise to images, and the images facilitate more
emotion."
Bonny is adamant that only "the greatest music written"
—classical music—be used in GIM sessions. And not
just any recording will do, she says, as "all performances
are not equal." Hours of listening go into choosing and
arranging those pieces that work best for specific emotional
issues. For instance, someone suffering from depression, Bonny
says, "will need music that is quiet, restful, and caring—so
I might choose a Haydn concerto for cello and orchestra."
Bonny also created a program called "Caring" for those
who aren't ready to delve too deeply, while another program
called "Recollection" stimulates childhood memories.
Richard Yensen, a psychologist who also worked with Bonny and
Grof, developed his own process, "Perceptual Affective
Therapy," which also uses sound and imagery. At the Orenda
Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is the director,
Yensen uses multimedia slides and a 20-channel sound system
to create "visionary journeys" for clients that depict
birth, death, terror, sex, peace, war, and happiness—
"all the material that forms a part of the transpersonal
consciousness," he says.
Like a kind of therapeutic "virtual reality," he says,
this environment "holds a person so that it mirrors his
innermost feelings.... People feel held, so they can regress
back to childhood. Music plays a very important role in inducing
that state—it is one of many ways of unhooking the ego
from its stranglehold on time and space."
Yensen illustrates how his method works with the story of a
client named June who had suffered intense rejection in childhood.
After a period of time during which he established a relationship
of trust with her—and after asking her permission—
Yensen says he presented June with a montage of childhood pictures
intermingled with pictures of starvation and violence. Then
she put on eye shades and listened to music; soon, she was flooded
with images from her childhood. After a journey through her
unconscious that, at one point, included her vomiting out her
"deep sense of worthlessness," Yensen says June eventually
arrived at a place of profound self- acceptance, describing
her rebirth as "a quality dot...a tiny real worth from
before the time of my parents...."
Unlike Bonny, who relies only on classical music, Yensen draws
on music from a variety of traditions, including a "chaos"
trance technique that is a disruptive audio montage of dive
bombers, subway sounds, native ceremonies, and raucous voices.
"Like a surgeon who uses a scalpel, I use a chaotic mixture
of sound to release what a client is holding onto." After
a client has been through a chaos state, in which he or she
may have opened up to vulnerable emotions, Yensen says he then
plays something calming like the "Brezairola" lullaby
from the "Songs of the Auvergne." He, too, chooses
his recordings carefully, saying that this particular version,
performed by Netania Davrath and arranged by Joseph Canteloube
(Vanguard Classics), is "sung with a great deal of emotion—you
have a sense of a flock of lambs in a pasture being mothered
by a strong feminine spirit."
While music provides a cathartic release for buried emotions,
one of the more cutting-edge forms of sonic therapy helps people
change their lives by changing their voices. Sound healer Mimi
O'Neil, a singer and Sufi teacher in Albany, New York, has taught
workshops on music and health around the world for nearly 30
years. Clients as diverse as policemen, lawyers, and businesswomen
often come to her studio, she says, "with an intuitive
sense that they don't sound right. What this really means is
that they don't feel that their voice is expressing their true
self." Northern Virginia voice expert and Sufi singer Sheila
Dhani Spring Rain echoes a similar refrain, saying that "the
voice is the lifeline to the soul. Like a blueprint, it can
show us where we're not connected to our own emotions or bodies."
Just by listening to people's voices, Spring Rain says she can
hear a person's spirit—how they process emotions or where
might need healing. One man who came to see her, for example,
"had both his lower and upper voice open—but his
middle notes were gone." After working with him for several
weeks she received the image of a coffin; after telling her
client this, he confirmed that he had lost both his parents
when he was a teenager —the time of puberty when the voice
changes. She recommended that he go into psychotherapy to work
on his unresolved grief, and within six months his voice had
regained its middle range.
The disconnection between the voice and the self, says O'Neil,
typically occurs during childhood or adolescence, when a person
may not have sufficient resources to deal with emotional wounding.
As a result, "a child may tense muscles in the body in
order to repress the pain, building up body armor that eventually
constricts her voice." This can lead to dysfunctional voice
patterns. The "throat-catching" voice, says O'Neil,
may signify issues around emotional control and anger; the "child's
voice" indicates a person with a fear of expressing power;
the "tunnel voice" is generally found in people who
rarely felt safe or experienced trust; and the "split voice"—a
voice that rises up and down—describes someone trapped
between childhood and adulthood.
O'Neil describes a client with a tightly clenched, "throat-grabbing"
voice. "Instead of opening naturally he was controlling
his emotions by constricting his voice. His breathing was high
up in his body, rather than integrated throughout his whole
system." O'Neil taught him to breathe properly from the
bottom of the spine, and to open the "mask of his face"
by opening the sinus passages, throat cavity, and air pipe down
to the lungs. Soon, she says, "this enormous voice emerged."
Yet while her client freely expressed himself with her, he confided
in O'Neil that at home "he sang softly in the bathroom
at night because I can't let anybody hear me."
In fact, fears around power arise naturally when a person's
real voice begins to emerge, says O'Neil, because "when
we work with the voice, we work with our essential power."
Spring Rain says she has also noticed that women who speak in
girlish voices tend to "have a problem being grounded in
their own power." Both sound healers view their work as
returning to people the gift of their unique natures—what
O'Neil calls a person's "soulsong" and Julia Cameron
calls their "true note."
"Many of the tools I work with are aimed at getting people
to excavate an inner mine of riches," adds Cameron, "so
that they are working in the area that is most fulfilling to
them. When people work with toning or melody, they come ‘into
tune' and it brings them to their vein of gold."
Singing
the Soul Home
As physically and emotionally healing as "music medicine"
can be, say sound experts, it ultimately leads a person full
circle—home to the abode of their soul. "Our wounds
are the portals to the transcendent," says Richard Yensen.
"One doesn't get to the transcendent by going beyond, but
by going through the great dramas of our lives that make us
who we are—and music has a profound capacity to address
the themes of tragedy, joy, and love that run through our lives."
In fact, say most practitioners, peak spiritual experiences
are a commonplace occurrence in music therapy. Helen Bonny says
that although she didn't talk about it much, "I knew from
the beginning that this was a very spiritual process. For some,
it's a life-changing experience that comes from a oneness with
God that they hadn't even guessed was a possibility—and
that is the source of real healing."
Not only clients, but music therapists can have peak experiences
during sessions, says Barbara Crowe—something that is
rarely acknowledged. She says that for a long time "the
transpersonal level has been deliberately edited out of music
therapy because there hasn't been a model to help us frame it."
Crowe calls for a more open discussion within the profession
about the spiritual dimension of their practice, saying that
even before she became interested in transpersonal psychology
she would notice that clients were "inadvertently having
spiritual experiences, with archetypal images that blew them
away." Her own approach with clients, she says, is that
"it's best to let those experiences stand on their own.
It isn't a technique where you do a lot of verbal processing,
because to talk about it is to diminish the experience. The
music both holds the experience and becomes the expression of
the experience."
The issue of how to handle spiritual experiences as they arise
within healing sessions is not so pronounced in the field of
sound healing. Its basis in mystical traditions of chant and
overtoning techniques culminates naturally in sublime experiences
of the transcendent. The danger, however, says Mimi O'Neil,
may lie in overlooking the psychological dimension. She warns
against an over-emphasis on altered states that bypass the ego,
creating a "spiritual split" that may unintentionally
foster grandiosity or inflation. Ultimately, however, says Pat
Moffitt-Cook, it is a balanced combination of both sound therapy
with a spiritual perspective that heals because "without
the foundation of a sacred attunement, healing cannot be sustained—the
disease or confusion returns." Concludes Yensen, the brush
with God that may occur during sound therapy cures because "it
provides us with a sense that we're not alone anymore—we've
come to the home of the human spirit, that place from which
we have come and to which we will ultimately return to."
Singing
the Earth Home
In times of war, musicians have been called upon to inspire
soldiers with a fighting spirit—using martial drumbeats
or national anthems to summon forth their courage and patriotism.
Today, with a world fractured by ethnic diversity and environmental
devastation, many musicians are heeding the call to perform,
compose, or record music that harmonizes differences and fosters
peace.
There exist many diverse expressions of this impulse to seek
world healing through music. For example, one of her missions
at Sounds True, says part-owner and publisher Tami Simon, is
to distribute the "sacred documents" of the world's
religious traditions. Thus, she has created a new world music
label called "Sacred Music of the World" with such
recordings as "Bismillah: Highlights from the Festival
of World Sacred Music," an annual world music festival
in Morocco.
Pat Moffitt-Cook sees global healing in the fact that cross-cultural
music helps breaks down prejudices. "Sometimes people are
too culturally conditioned to the rhythms, melodies, and cadences
of the particular culture that formed them." she says.
Especially in the multicultural landscape of contemporary America,
she says, it is "arrogant not to bring in world music for
therapeutic treatment. When I walk down a hospital hallway,
half of all patients may have migrated from Vietnam, Mexico,
or Japan. Thus we need a repertoire of music that can help heal
people from all cultures—which America is."
In addition, says Moffitt-Cook, all cultures find common ground
in the universal desire to use sound and music for healing.
This ancient instinct is finding contemporary expression in
weekly "chant" circles. Tami Simon, for instance,
describes the Boulder circle she recently joined as a non- denominational
group that chants and sings "sound rounds" from different
traditions. Kay Gardner has also organized several singing groups
in her hometown. When a woman was dying in a nursing home, members
sang hymns around her bedside to accompany her soul's passing.
At one point in their singing, the woman woke up from a coma
in time to say goodbye to family members.
Jonathan Goldman explains the healing power of group singing
by saying that "when you make sound together you create
a group consciousness and begin to understand the community
of all things." Especially when chanting harmonics, he
says, "sounds that you weren't creating begin to occur;
it's an incredible phenomenon as the creation is greater than
the sum of its parts."
Indeed, though it may seem esoteric to some, it is the view
of many sonic practitioners that sound healing not only treats
individual wounds but is helping to accomplish what Goldman
describes as a global "vibrational shift." There is
an "evolutionary impulse at work," he believes, "that
is trying to get us to vibrate at higher levels of peace, compassion,
and love." Julia Cameron agrees, saying that "we're
in the middle of a spiritual revolution that is galvanized by
sound." In some "deep and startling spiritual experiences"
she had several years ago, Cameron says she heard repeatedly
the words "body of sound, body of light" and saw visions
of amphitheaters of people "toning" together.
Today, she wears a large medallion around her neck with an image
of the earth in the center and concentric rings of people around
it. "I always say the medallion is a picture of my job;
that is to get people to remember their music, to sing us back
to health—to sing the earth home."
Contributing editor and book editor, Pythia Peay,
is a freelance writer and a columnist for Religion News Service.
Back to Top
Mother-love
an ideal that doesn't always match reality
By
PYTHIA PEAY
Religion News Service
On
Mother's Day, the nation pays tribute to one of humankind's
most cherished relationships -- the tender caretaking a woman
bestows upon her child.
Beautifully rendered in religious pictures of the Divine Mother
and Holy Child -- such as the Christian images of Mary and Jesus
or the Egyptian portrayals of Isis and Osiris -- it is the sort
of selfless devotion that comes closest to divine love.
But though mother-love is a perennial ideal of mystics and poets,
philosophers and theologians, the institution of motherhood
has been rife with conflict and suffering and as some feminist
thinkers in recent decades have argued, women have paid dearly
for the sweet bliss of motherhood, enduring economic hardship
and exclusion from power for their efforts.
And despite the enormous strides modern-day women -- and men
-- have achieved to right this wrong, vestiges of "mother
prejudice" still remain, especially, say some feminist
psychologists, when it comes to the mother-son bond, a powerful
combination that, if close, threatens societal expectations
of what it means to be a "real man."
I experienced this phenomenon recently when my 21-year-old son,
confused about his life direction, dropped out of college and
returned home. Response from friends and family members was
swift: Kick him out; make him pay rent; and don't make it "easy"
by taking care of him. Rarely did I hear a supportive word of
encouragement.
Several weeks ago my son departed home once again to live in
another country. From my perspective he left strengthened in
spirit, hopefully having weathered a difficult passage. But
the experience shocked me into realizing how deeply engrained
are those cultural stereotypes that judge a man as somehow less
masculine if he has not "cut the apron springs" of
his tie with his mother.
My experience came as no surprise to Phyllis Chesler, a psychologist
and feminist pioneer who is the author of many books, including
"Letters To A Young Feminist" (Four Walls Eight Windows),
a series of essays that includes a missive to her 21-year-old
son, Ariel.
"The culture-at-large expects sons to desert mothers as
immature, overly controlling, and not powerful enough,"
she said. "Thus, it's seen as shameful to remain close
to one's mother -- as in Ôsissy,' or Ômama's boy.'
Manhood today is still seen as something that's cut loose from
the socializing forces of womanhood. And that is tragic."
Why is it a tragedy for a man to grow up by growing away from
his mother and all things "feminine?"
Because, said Harriet Lerner, a staff psychologist at the Menninger
Clinic in Topeka, Kan., and the author of "The Mother Dance:
How Children Change Your Life" (HarperCollins), "boys
don't suffer from becoming like their mothers. Instead, boys
suffer from the false notion that they should grow up to be
as unlike their mothers as possible.
"Indeed, it is an untenable situation for a son to be nurtured
and loved by a woman whose very traits the boy is then taught
to deny in himself," she said.
In his book, "I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming
the Secret Legacy of Male Depression" (Fireside), psychologist
Terrance Real described the source of this cultural myth as
the "fear of the feminizing mother." The idea boys
must rupture an effeminizing connection to mother, he said,
"is one of the oldest, least questioned, and most deeply
rooted myths of patriarchy."
Real, co-director of the Harvard University Gender Research
Project, called for an end to this "repulsive myth,"
arguing while such a rite-of-passage is considered essential
to boys' socialization it also creates a wound "that sets
up their vulnerability to depression as men."
According to Real, traditional gender socialization requires
boys and girls to "halve themselves." Girls are encouraged
to be more emotionally expressive, while repressing their more
assertive selves.
The reverse is true for boys, who must dampen their feelings
in order to develop their public persona. And while there has
been much research around the professional setbacks women have
incurred as a result of this split socialization, there has
been little publicity around the damage done to young boys'
emotional development.
But as a growing body of research shows, young boys who heed
society's message to distance themselves from their mothers
simultaneously cut off their "relational" nature --
the loving, nurturing, empathetic qualities the culture generally
associates with women.
"Thus boys," Lerner said, "grow up to become
the very boyfriends, husbands and fathers whose girlfriends,
wives and children complain can't relate." Likewise, such
men are more likely to become alienated from their own inner
psyche.
This "relational loss," as it is described, may even
be a source of male violence and aggression.
"Disconnection from the self is what enables violence,"
said Judy Chu, a doctoral candidate in human development in
psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who
is researching the behavior of young boys and adolescent males.
"You can't hurt somebody else if you're in touch with what
you're feeling. Thus if you can experience your own pain it
would be a very difficult thing to inflict pain on another,"
she said.
But Chu's research has turned up some surprising findings. For
one thing, she said, it is wrong to assume boys and their mothers
actually "separate" from each another, as is supposed
to happen.
Instead, she said, "it's as though mothers' and sons' desire
to be close becomes illicit and goes underground. But it's still
there."
Adolescent boys, for instance, still report that they feel most
comfortable talking with their mother, who they also say know
them best. And yet it is taboo to exhibit that intimacy in public.
Indeed, Chu says boys learn from an early age to accommodate
society's expectations around their mothers, noting boys in
nursery schools are more likely to display physical affection
with their fathers.
Can the mother-son relationship ever be healed of the deep-rooted
distortions that obscure its value to society?
Things might change, said these psychologists, if the culture
did more to restore honor to the role mothers play in raising
men with heart, rather than caricaturing them as smothering
and possessive.
"I see mothers as great philosophers and teachers,"
Chesler said. "They have to teach a child everything without
breaking their spirit, and socialize them without humiliating
them -- some corporate CEO's don't even know how to do this.
Thus, in an age of coarsening, narcissism and profit run amok,
the public culture desperately needs the wisdom of mothers."
Back to Top
Interview:
At the cutting edge of using psychological concepts
in soul work is spiritual teacher Hameed Ali.
"By
Pythia Peay, Common Boundary Magazine."
It's
a conflict as old as the religious instinct itself: whether
to fully engage in the exhilarating turmoil of everyday life
or seek out a more transcendent reality? To pursue individual
self-fulfillment or sublimate one's personal needs in service
to the divine? In its most dramatic form, this tension between
the secular and the spiritual has played itself out between
those who have chosen an ascetic path as monks or sannyasins
and those who have decided upon a more worldly way of life-marrying,
raising children, enjoying the sensual dimensions of earthly
experience.
With
the advent of psychology, this tension has assumed a new twist:
what to do with the ego. Almost all mystical traditions see
the ego as an obstacle to unfoldment. Selflessness and surrender
are thought to be the keys to a genuine spiritual life. In contrast,
modern-day psychology views a strongly defined sense of identity
as the linchpin of human development. For those individuals
with a foot on both paths, the contrast between the psychological
and spiritual perceptions of the individual "I" can
sometimes prove troubling.
Hameed
Ali, a spiritual teacher living in Berkeley, California, has
devoted his life's work to healing the schism between these
opposing perspectives. In one of his many books, The Pearl Beyond
Price: Integration of Personality into Being, Ali, who writes
under the pen name A.H. Almaas, addresses the longstanding friction
between what he calls "the man of the world and the man
of spirit." The central difference between these two views,
he writes, is that the first considers the separate personal
self to be the center of life .. while the latter makes a higher
reality to be the center of life, and believes that the personal
life must be subordinated in relationship to such a higher reality."
Yet, Ali wondered, if "the ultimate goal of the human being
is the universal impersonal truths of Spirit, why is it that
all humans end up with an ego, with a self and a personality?
Can it be just a ... colossal mistake?"
Concluding
that the personal self could not be some kind of aberration,
Ali delved more deeply into the nature of the ego, seeking to
understand it in a way that gave it meaning without contradicting
timeless spiritual perspectives. Drawing upon the insights of
developmental psychology, a field that includes object relations
and self, depth, and ego psychologies, he studied how the ego
develops during early childhood. Recognizing that this knowledge
about the origins of human individuality had never before existed
until this century, he saw it as a kind of missing link in spiritual
unfoldment. At the same time, because psychology omitted the
transcendent dimension of experience, it could take a person
only as far as the limits of individual development, but no
farther. Thus like the founder of analytical psychology, Swiss
psychiatrist Carl G. Jung; the founder of psychosynthesis, Italian
psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli; and other transpersonal theorists,
Ali sought to bring together the spiritual and the psychological
in one unified discipline. He has perhaps succeeded in this
task in a more practical way than those who preceded him. As
the noted transpersonal writer and thinker Ken Wilber writes
in Eye of Spirit, Ali's unique method, known as "The Diamond
Approach," combines "some of the best of modern Western
psychology with ancient (and spiritual) wisdom ... uniting ...
spiritual and psychological into a coherent and effective form
of inner work."
What
sets Ali's Diamond Approach apart from that of other transpersonal
theorists? For one thing, his orientation is that of a spiritual
teacher not a psychotherapist. Thus work on one's personality
is used as a way to access spiritual states of consciousness,
much in the same way as prayer or meditation. Second, he is
one of the first spiritual teachers to have ever formally worked
on transference-the transferring of childhood emotions onto
present-day relationships-with his students.
But
Ali's most significant contribution to both spiritual and psychological
thought is the way in which he has located the ego along the
spectrum of spiritual development. Rather than accept the traditional
religious view that the ego is a falsehood that must die for
transformation to occur, or the psychological concept that ego
development is a complete process on its own, or the more recent
transpersonal view that the ego must be developed prior to its
transcendence-as in the aphorism made popular by psychologist
and longtime Buddhist meditator Jack Engler: "You have
to be somebody before you can be nobody. "Ali envisions
the ego as a pale imitation of a more glorious reality, capable
of manifesting a far richer consciousness in everyday life than
had been thought possible.
Spiritual
work is not a matter of repairing certain life situations. It
has to do with repairing our disconnection from spirit.
Ali
discovered that just as psychotherapy helps people see where
they may be blocked in achieving greater intimacy, so, too,
can psychological techniques highlight areas where a person's
ego defenses obstruct or distort their relationship to the divine.
Thus in the Diamond Approach, understanding one's psychological
make-up is an integral step toward spiritual unfoldment. This
occurs through a process of "inquiry" into the structure
of one's personality. By questioning how one feels in the present
moment and then accepting one's emotions, a person locates those
areas where they feel a sense of lack, or what Ali calls "holes."
It is through these holes, or empty spaces, that the transpersonal
dimension of a quality arises. For instance, a certain life
situation might trigger feelings of powerlessness. By going
deeply into that painful feeling rather than resisting it, a
true sense of empowerment might begin to emerge. "Through
your hurt, you will find the compassion to tolerate the hurt
and go deeper," writes John Davis in his new book, The
Diamond Approach: An Introduction to the Teachings of A.H. Almaas,
and through "your shame, you will come to the sense of
self-worth that allows you to open more."
In
the Diamond Approach, this process of inquiry is seen as a kind
of metabolism. By deeply understanding the nature of the ego-its
defenses, attachments, and identifications that developed as
a response to childhood conditions-it becomes, Davis writes
' "integrated ... into the self." One "digests"
those parts of the self that had been previously been split
off or misunderstood. In doing so, one matures into the fullness
of the authentic self what Ali terms the "Pearl,"
or one's "true Essential personality." Yet this self
is neither "spiritual" nor "worldly, " but
a synthesis of both. The result is a human being whose individuality
is rooted in a broader eternal reality, rather than conditioned
patterns of behavior, and who is able to manifest in everyday
life a range of divine qualities such as compassion, integrity,
or harmony. This developmental process, Ali explains, could
be called " God becoming a human person, an individual,
" instead of a human being seeking to become less individual
and more impersonally transcendent.
Although
the core of Ali's Diamond Approach revolves around psychological
inquiry, his path to expanded consciousness draws upon Buddhism,
Sufism, the enneagram, and body work, among other methods. His
teachings as they exist today, he said during the course of
our interview, arose directly out of his own spiritual odyssey.
As he explains, "It is important to understand that I did
not develop my work by organizing it at the beginning, looking
at the various theories and integrating them. It was a living
and organic process of development that was guided by spirit."
Born
in Kuwait and raised in a large Muslim family, Ali came to California
in 1963 to study physics. His passion to decode the mysteries
of reality eventually led him to study with the Chilean psychiatrist
Claudia Naranjo, a pioneer in developing the enneagram. In addition,
Ali studied with various Buddhist and Gurdjieffian Sufi teachers.
Still, he does not identify himself with any specific religious
or spiritual tradition.
Ali's
Diamond Approach, also known as Diamond Heart Work, is taught
in group and individual settings by certified teachers within
the Ridhwan (an Arabic term that means "the manifestation
of contentment in the complete human being") Foundation.
According to Executive Director Janel Ensler, Ali first established
the Ridhwan Foundation in 1983, then formed the Diamond Heart
and Training Institute (DHAT), the seminary/educational arm
of the Ridhwan Foundation, in 1992. The teacher training, Ensler
says, "is a whole other level of commitment. We do not
certify teachers who have not already been students of the Diamond
Approach for quite some time." Training lasts for approximately
seven to eight years; the exact nature of this training is kept
private in order, Ensler says, "to discourage premature
interest" in it. Currently, approximately 1,500 students
are directly or indirectly involved with the Diamond Approach.
The Ridhwan Foundation has centers in Berkeley, California,
and Boulder, Colorado, with outlying groups in Seattle/Vancouver,
Montana, Hawaii, Boston, New York, Arizona, and Michigan, as
Europe and Australia.
By
all accounts, Ali, who is married and has a daughter, is a kind,
gentle teacher, who shuns the public eye and whose abiding commitment
is to the search for truth. Sometimes called a "teacher
of teachers," Ali has over the years become a trusted guide
to Buddhist and Sufi meditation teachers, as well as to a growing
number of psychotherapists and spiritual students. Indeed, Ali's
reputation as a leading figure at the forefront of the psychospiritual
movement is what sparked Common Boundary's interest to learn
more about his quest to understand one of life's enduring mysteries
the nature and purpose of the human ego.
Common
Boundary: I want to begin by asking you about the conflict between
"the man of the spirit" and "the man of the world."
Does resolving this conflict form the basis for much of your
work?
Hameed
Ali: Definitely. To integrate the spiritual life with normal
life is a central principle of the Diamond Heart work. Frequently,
spirituality is seen as something set apart from life. But human
beings have the potential to live a life of fullness, richness,
and freedom, and that happens when the spiritual dimension is
brought into our everyday life.
CB:
In the past have spiritual traditions led us away from life?
HA:
Not uniformly, but there is that tendency, and for good reason!
It's easy to be trapped by everyday concerns and forget the
spiritual dimension. Many teachings push life concerns away
in order to be able to focus on the spiritual because life is
seen as some kind of a seduction and it can function that way.
That is why bringing the two together is not easy.
CB:
You also say that ego develop-ment and spiritual enlightenment
are not separate but part of the same process. Is this one of
the ways that you work to make spiri-tual transformation part
of real life?
HA:
It's more like I see human life as development. Personal consciousness,
what I call the soul, evolves and matures. Some stages have
to do with the development of the ego. It's not like something
is wrong; ego development is just one of the natural stages
necessary for spiritual realization to occur in further stages.
During childhood, for example, our consciousness gets structured
and organized in a certain way. A sense of self develops, an
identity that people call the ,,ego," though it can also
be described as self-centeredness. But in that process we learn
how to live a physical life; our minds and a discriminating
awareness develop, as well. This discriminating awareness needs
to develop if we are going to have true spiritual realization
and it develops partly through ego development. It's all part
of the same process.
CB:
So you are saying that ego development isn't just necessary
to live in the world, but that it plays a central role in our
spiritual development as well.
HA:
Yes. When we say "spiritual" it usually means that
we are more explicitly aware of the spiritual dimension, but
that doesn't mean that previous stages are not in the service
of that spiritual dimension. At the same time, there is always
the possibility of arrested development, of getting stuck in
a certain stage. Many people go through ego development but
don't go much beyond it. They think that's it. When that happens
we live an ego life. It's not a great thing, not because it
is bad but because we have the potential to develop beyond the
ego. We're bound to suffer if we get stuck in arrested development
because our potential is not fulfilled.
CB:
How do you go beyond the ego?
HA:
By understanding it and metabolizing it. The ego is not something
on its own. It's a perceptual process that happens in our mind
and in our consciousness through which we develop a sense of
self; we individuate and develop a personal identity in the
world. By understanding that process, we can take it to the
next step, which is to integrate and metabolize those structures
and concepts into our spiritual nature. This leads to the development
of a certain quality of the spiritual nature that has to do
with being in the world, what I call "the pearl beyond
price."
CB:
Is that what you refer to as "Personal Essence?"
HA:
Right. The ego is in the direction of the pearl beyond price,
but it is still at a mental level. It hasn't filled out yet
with inner substance and richness; it's empty. But a person
who has that "pearl beyond price" is filled with spiritual
richness.
CB:
I'm still not sure I understand how one goes about metabolizing
the ego.
HA:
Because experience is patterned by our ego, we don't experience
things directly or purely. Our perception has many veils and
patterns to it, and our actions and choices are all conditioned
by our history. By understanding our actions and feelings-by
recognizing what a certain situation is really about, what makes
it that way, or what the truth is that is underlying it-we begin
to see the mental nature of these obstructions and how they
developed in early childhood.
CB:
Is this where you draw on the insights of object relations and
developmental psychology?
HA:
Yes, because both object relations and developmental psychology
offer good theories as to how the ego develops. I use a large
part of that knowledge in understanding our personal experience
of the present moment.
Spirit
is a presence like the full moon-solid, full, and round.
And when you feel that in your center, you immediately feel
different from the way you did before.
CB:
Can you give me a specific example of how a person might go
beyond the obstructions of the ego using your method?
HA:
One example might be a person who always has relationship problems.
By exploring the nature of their difficulties with intimacy,
they might recall early childhood experiences. For instance,
people might remember that at certain times as children they
were so intimate with their mother or another family member
that they did not have a separate identity; they were consumed
or undifferentiated. This is a common thing, but people become
scared because it means losing their separateness. Yet as they
continue to explore the original condition of being undifferentiated,
it might take them to a state in which they realize that the
childhood experience was sometimes good. There was some genuineness
to it, some authenticity, that could lead them to the quality
in their original nature that has to do with unity and oneness.
CB:
So do you do this in personal sessions, like a psychotherapist?
HA:
Not exactly. We do therapy in the sense that we explore the
present experience. As we explore, we don't intentionally go
into childhood. But exploring present experiences often reveals
childhood patterns; it's in the experience itself. But there
are two ways in which we depart from psychotherapy and go in
a different direction. One is that we don't look at all the
conflictual situations, we just try to understand our experience,
whether positive or negative. While psychotherapy deals with
the conflicts in order to ameliorate them, the direction of
Diamond thought is to understand any experience by recognizing
what the truth is about it-not trying to correct it, just trying
to understand it.
The
second way in which we differ from psychotherapy is that at
a certain juncture we begin to see the spiritual component of
the situation. For instance, the person who is afraid of intimacy
is, at some deep level, resisting a positive spiritual quality,
such as unity. So the question of intimacy and relationships
goes much deeper than the personal level. If you seek to understand
and to allow the experience to manifest the truth, then these
things just emerge because the spiritual and psychological are
truly connected.
CB:
It's fascinating the way you see how a person's psychological
problems are often the negative reflection of a more positive
quality. How does this work with will, one of the qualities
that you mention as being central to both everyday life and
the spiritual path?
HA:
A conflict around will, for instance, might manifest in everyday
life as a lack of confidence or an inability to persevere. It
might also appear as too much will; a person may be too hard
or harsh. Exploring this conflict more deeply will reveal a
disconnection, a spiritual gap or abyss, from true will. Through
understanding and experiencing this abyss, the spiritual quality
of will is able to manifest itself.
CB:
The way that you describe disconnection from true will as an
"abyss" or a "gap" brings to mind the way
that, in your work, you use the term "hole." Through
your method of inquiry, students experientially feel a gap or
hole in their body. Could you explain this technique further.?
HA:
When we inquire into our experience in order to understand it,
it has to be our present experience, what we are feeling in
the moment. Present experience is an embodied experience, related
to our body, mind, and emotions. When we come upon a dimension
of our experience that has to do with disconnection from our
true nature, we experience that disconnection as a kind of emptiness,
a hole.
Take
will, for instance. The center of the will is in the solar plexus.
So when a person begins to be aware that they don't have will,
they feel an emptiness, a hole, in the solar plexus. As a person
stays with that feeling in order to understand it, the hole
opens up and expands. Gradually some understanding of why we
are disconnected in that area may begin to emerge. For example,
a man may have felt castrated by his father or a woman may have
had a chauvinistic father. As the source of a person's disconnection
from true will is revealed and the hole is fully experienced,
then something begins to appear there, a presence like a full
silver moon appears and fills the solar plexus. The quality
of authentic will begins to emerge, and the person feels power
and confidence.
Spirit
is a presence, like the full moon-solid, full, and round. And
when you feel that in your center, you immediately feel different
from the way you did before.
CB:
Throughout your work, you describe what seem like different
layers of consciousness, terms such as "Being," "Essence,"
and "Personal Essence. "
HA:
I use "Being" and "Essence" and "Spirit"
interchangeably, yet with a slightly different emphasis. When
I use the word "Being" I mean the spiritual nature
of everything. When I say "Essence," I am talking
about the spiritual nature of the person, which is the same
thing as Being but as it is focused within a person. Being or
Essence or Spirit could be described as a multidimensional aliveness
that also has a dimension of emptiness and awareness and can
manifest itself as qualities such as love, compassion, clarity,
and strength. I call these the Essential Qualities; they are
ways that Being or Essence differentiates itself through our
particular experience in life. These Essential Qualities are
necessary for integrating a personal life with the spirit.
CB:
This emphasis on the immanent dimension of the divine as it
manifests in creation through the various qualities would seem
to dis-tinguish your school from Budd-hism and Hinduism, which
em-phasize the more impersonal, otherworldly aspects of the
divine.
HA:
If you look at the Far Eastern traditions, especially as they
came through India, there is the idea that liberation is freedom
from life and death. So while these traditions include the personal
aspect, they tend more to see liberation in terms of leaving
life; it's not liberation in life.
CB:
You also write about the Sufi and Christian traditions as being
more in line with what you're teaching. Why is that?
HA:
Sufism is part of the Western tradition because it has its roots
in Neoplatonism. Western tradition includes Judaism, Christianity,
and the Islamic tradition. They all originated in the same place
and tend to emphasize life in the present, life here and now.
It's the opposite view from that of the Eastern traditions.
CB:
The way that you describe using psychological inquiry to access
altered states of consciousness differs from the usual means
of prayer or meditation.
HA:
Yes, it is very different. That is why I think of it as a Western
method, as a way of understanding and inquiry. Socrates ' for
instance, who was a central figure in the development of the
Western tradition, basically asked questions. That's what we
do, we ask questions.
CB:
So you don't pray or have meditations as part of your practice?
HA:
We do have meditations at different junctions of our work. We
do some sitting meditations, prayers, chanting, and visualizations,
but we see those as supports to the principal practice, which
is the inquiry into experiences. Our visualizations and prayers
are drawn from different traditions, such as Buddhism and Sufism.
CB:
One of the things that I find most intriguing is that while
you work with students as a spiritual teacher, you also work
with the issue of transference.
HA:
Yes, I use transference similarly to the way it is used in psychotherapy.
Our main message is inquiry into experience. When there is teacher-student
bonding, transference and countertransference issues are bound
to arise. They are part of the truth of the situation. As we
enter into a deeper understanding of the situation, those constructs
become useful. Still, we don't focus on transference as much
as psychoanalysis does.
CB:
I'm sure you're aware that there have been many crises and scandals
in this country in spiritual organizations because of sexual
misconduct on the part of teachers. Do you feel that working
with issues of transference will help to prevent that kind of
abuse?
HA:
Well, yes, partly. But sexual misconduct happens in psychotherapy
too, probably even more than in spiritual situations! So working
with transference does not necessarily help with that. However,
we do have ethical guidelines and educate our teachers about
issues of transference.
CB:
Still, do you not feel that a spiritual teacher working on issues
of transference and countertransference with his students is
setting a precedence within the spiritual traditions?
HA:
Oh yes. I think it would be great if spiritual teachers in general
would recognize the power of transference and countertransference
because it is very useful for clarifying the teacher-student
relationship. As you know, the relationship between teacher
and student needs to be open and clear for there to be true
transmission.
CB:
Do you see psychology as an historic addition to the spiritual
path?
Frequently,
spirituality is seen as something set apart from life. But human
beings have the potential to live a life of fullness, richness,
and freedom. That happens when the spiritual dimension is brought
into our everyday life.
HA:
That's a good way of looking at it. I think of psychological
knowledge as a necessary development within the Western spiritual
current. Yet right now psychology is separate from the spiritual
tradition; they are two fields. As time passes and we see their
connection, however, the spiritual traditions will have new
knowledge of psychology that they didn't have before. It will
be very enriching.
CB:
Do you feel that other traditions are beginning to open up to
the psychological dimension of spiritual unfoldment?
HA:
Some teachers are more open than others. It's a tricky situation,
though, with many pitfalls because you cannot just take psychotherapy
and try to add it to the spiritual. Many spiritual teachers
and traditions are cautious about therapy because therapy can
focus people on the self in such a way that it excludes their
spirit. By attempting to solve problems mentally instead of
spiritually, psychotherapy can become a deviation from the spiritual
path. I think it's important to have a balance, to have the
spiritual qualities established and then do the psychological
as an assistance.
CB:
By having the spiritual solidly established, do you mean spiritual
practices and meditation techniques?
HA:
That's part of it. But I mean the teaching itself, the teacher,
and a spiritual orientation.
CB:
As spirituality and psychology seem to be drawing closer together,
a discussion has arisen around the necessity for ethical guidelines
drawing certain boundaries between the two fields. For instance,
some have wondered whether spiritual teachers should engage
in therapy with their clients, or whether psychotherapists should
meditate or pray with their clients. What are your feelings
on this topic?
HA:
Our school is about spiritual work, not psychotherapy. We use
psychological methods as part of our spiritual work because
our orientation is spiritual integration. One way that we make
a clear distinction between our work and psychotherapy is that
we sometimes recommend psychotherapy to some of our students:
for instance, if someone has a pressing emotional problem. Our
work is not oriented at solving that right away. Our work is
understanding and integrating it into the larger self, and it
might not be fast enough for the person who needs immediate
healing. So we don't confuse psychotherapy with spiritual work
because spiritual work is not a matter of repairing certain
life situations. It has to do with repairing our disconnection
or alienation from the spirit. Although in time spiritual work
would repair a person's life situation, it's a much longer life
development.
CB:
One area where you offer spiritual insight into a difficult
psychological disorder is with regard to narcissism, which you
describe as a primary spiritual disorder. Can you elaborate
on what you mean by that?
HA:
Most people understand narcissism from the perspective of how
it developed in childhood. I look at the basic distortion that
causes narcissism, which is a disconnection from one's spiritual
nature. When one is disconnected from one's spiritual nature,
instead of having a true center, one has a gap within oneself.
One's sense of self is unstable. If we're not connected with
our true spiritual nature, we don't have an authentic self;
we have a false, made-up self. That's exactly what narcissism
is: an attempt to support and express a fake self. It's not
seeing other people, yet always wanting to be seen. Why is that?
Because a person is not sure of his or her separate self. Because
they don't have that inner security, they're always self-focused.
CB:
As we go forward into the next millennium, how will spirituality
differ from the way it has been understood in the past?
HA:
I think there are several trends. One is to not separate spirituality
from daily life; another is that psychological knowledge will
be integrated more and more into spiritual work. And cyberspace
will be increasingly used to disseminate teachings. However,
I also think there will undoubtedly be strange developments,
both wholesome and not, whose combinations we cannot anticipate
yet. These are only intuitions, not knowledge.
Anyone
who wishes further information about the Diamond Approach may
contact: DHAT, P 0. Box 10114, Berkeley, CA 94709. Pythia Peay
is a contributing editor and the book editor for Common Boundary
Back to Top
Ever
since he was a child, accompanying his mother to her small plot
of farmland under the hot Indian sun, Satish Kumar has spent
his life walking. At nine, he joined an order of wandering Jain
monks and, for a decade, wore no shoes so that his footfall
would be “softer and gentler” on ants and insects.
Both his mother and guru helped imprint in his heart Jain ideas
of reverence for all forms of life. Kumar was taught to handle
even the lowly mosquito with care, gently removing rather than
swatting it away. Over the years, Kumar’s pacifism coalesced
around the discipline of walking as both a form of meditation
and a means to change the world.