Dean's Messages

June 2009 (vol. 3, issue 3)

"Healing with Nature in Mind"
Excerpt from graduation address presented on March 27, 2009
at the Holistic Counseling Center, Oakland, CA

The theme you have chosen for today's graduation ritual is "Nature." By choosing this theme I trust you believe that healing occurs when we keep nature in mind. In my remarks this afternoon, I shall try to tie the skills and values that you possess to attributes of nature in the hope that the associations shed light upon your future life and career.

Nature, according to Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers in A Simple Way, is "a living, experimental system of discovery of what's possible at all levels of scale, from microbes to cosmos." Nature contextualizes humanity as a whole organism that is itself a part of a larger ecology. What is it about the ways nature manages herself that are instructive to you as therapists? First, nature is constantly creating, changing, growing, and evolving. Nature's way is to diversify, and its every move is provisional. Nature continually seeks connections, organizing into complex systems that include more relationships, more variety. As a culture, however, we standardize things, narrowing what we value into forms of specialization, eschewing the different and unique. Moreover, we doggedly seek certainty, as if confusing it with truth or meaning. We value control and the engineering of human performance in places where we would do better to open ourselves to the surprise of what freely emerges from beyond our control.

Secondly, each aspect of nature is separate but not separated, discrete but related in a web of dynamic and complex associations to the whole. Living systems theory maintains that nothing lives, let alone thrives, in isolation. A white-crowned sparrow, for example, learns its song by listening to other birds as it matures. Unlike its vocal chords, a bird's song is connected to a group. On a social level, it is dangerous to leave people behind, leading as it often does to apathy, anger, and waste. Because life is dynamically interdependent, what is isolated atrophies, and the system collapses. For our life's work to be transformative, the boundaries of the self must be seen as semi-permeable, so that the self can engage others, realize our co-identities, and create linkages by which we can leverage the system and ourselves upward.

Thirdly, nature is purposeful. Everything in nature has a function. Each tree, river, and flower in nature is a Holon, that is, a whole that is part of a larger whole. Each component of nature is viable in itself, and each is connected in ways consistent with patterns of coherence of the larger living whole. For example, a whole atom is part of a whole molecule, a whole molecule is part of a whole cell, and a whole cell is part of a whole organism. As intimate parts of the larger evolution of life, we must, as a matter of survival, live with nature in a community of living subjects, rather than treating the natural world as a collection of dumb, unthinking objects that we dominate and trash.

The earth's evolution cannot be separated from that of its forms of life. As therapists and as creatures of nature, our primary community is the natural world, and so we might ask ourselves daily the following three questions. First, how like nature can we diversify our skills and talents in greater depth and breadth? We should consider how we might creatively apply our gifts in our professional practice for the purpose of our personal development and the greater good. We can reflect upon how we might be artful in our work, our relationships, and our very Being. On this point Clarissa Pinkola Estes has stated, "Creativity is less the creation of things but much more so the ability and tenacity to consistently use tests, the trials and triumphs of one's life over many years' time, in order to become oneself, a true and living work of art."

We might consider next the question as to how we can use our resources and capacities to foster interdependent, cooperative actions that heal an individual, stabilize a family, sustain the human spirit, and revere the soul of the world. The African word Ubuntu means, "I am because we are; because we are, therefore I am." Also to the point here is the Japanese word Ningen that literally means "between or among people." All this is to say that we are inter-relational beings who do not realize the trans-existential consciousness of our full human natures when alienated from others or isolated from the world. Sharon Begley's 2003 "Science Digest" column in the Wall Street Journal reported, "Geneticists find that when they add up the tiny genetic variations that make one person different from next, there are more differences within races than between races."

Finally, we might reflect each day on the question as to how in the manner of nature we might realize our life's purpose. Here we consider how we can live authentically, fulfilling our dharma, sacred duty, telos, life-calling, or right livelihood. We reflect upon the fact that who we are does not result simply from past events, but also from effects that our future dreams, goals, aspirations, and promptings of the soul have upon the choices we make in the present. The Bhagavad-Gita of Hindu India teaches, "Your own duty done imperfectly is better than another man's done well. Better to die in one's duty; another man's duty is perilous." As holistically trained therapists, you have learned and mastered a delivery system; it is now up to you as to what of yourselves you will deliver through your work to the world.

Nature reflects a holism of dynamic parts. Conceptual thinking is one useful kind of intelligence, but it offers a reductive view of the world in bite-sized images and facts. We need to employ a range of subjective and qualitative ways of thinking that, along with analytical reason, can produce deep insights into the conditions of our lives. We need to develop and apply the soft intuitive mind that is supple, subtle, and receptive, in addition to the hard analytical mind. As professionally trained therapists, you have learned to see your work and the world from holistic and systems perspectives that provide you the big picture context without which details, no matter how precise, can easily mislead the search for explanation and healing. We might look to nature for inspiration as to how we can develop holistic structures, processes, and operating models to assist our counseling centers, therapy offices, classroom instruction, and personal life practice. When looking to the living, sustainable system of nature as a model for our life and work, however, we should not imagine some kind of homogeneous, conflict-free environment.

Systems provide stability and freedom for experimentation that helps to ensure the system's health only when change takes place. Living systems - whether in nature, government, higher education, or mental health - are changing systems that must have essential inhibitors and limiters, along with expansion, to achieve health, or else they become cancerous at the cellular level or authoritarian at the social-political level, preventing or co-opting new possibilities. Living systems become pathological when they have but a single agent empowered in ways that other agents cannot bring forward different or new information. When a system refuses to accept new ideas, it faces the threat of death by equilibrium. Dialogue and mutuality are essential to a system's health.

NATURE'S WISDOM

Often in our work as in our life, we are overwhelmed or hurt. During such times, we can find fortification of spirit by wandering in the woods, listening to nature's sounds cape, or gazing at the night's open sky. By freely giving ourselves over to the magnitude of nature, we can distance ourselves from our cares and realize something of our deeper selves. Rilke wrote, "If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too..." Gerald G. May states in The Wisdom of the Wilderness that true education in life and on the job means learning to be cope-less. This doesn't mean that we do without intelligence or will, retreating into desperate quietism. It means instead that we learn to be fully present to life without forcing an issue into resolution. It means that to cultivate a living relationship with one's own or another's nature, we need to dim the light of the ego, enter the darkness of unknowing, and attend creatively to what emerges from the depths of Being.

In this way we can see nature as a complex curriculum for the instruction of skills and values. Walking among towering sequoias or along the majestic sea, we may learn an epistemology of presence to life that moves our minds past mechanized thinking or conditioned behavior. Knowledge by presence means not only that we consider the outer data of the world, but that we be fully available to ourselves and others, so as to embrace non-defensive openness, flexibility of thought, curiosity, wonder, suspension of disbelief, and a willingness to be changed by self-inquiry. We can learn pedagogy of entrainment wherein our mental and physiological rhythms synchronize with those of the natural world to create peace within us. Finally, we can learn an integral empiricism from deep listening, seeing, tasting, and touching the miracles of nature to which we intimately relate.

Let me close out my remarks by citing Francis Bacon whose own keen insight into nature is instructive here. Bacon wrote, "The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners (sic) resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own."

We can say that the ant of which Bacon speaks is the therapist as gifted technician of the soul, collecting and using learned psychotherapeutic theories, models, and skills for the good of others. The spider is the therapist as creative intellectual who engenders new therapeutic models and procedures from out of her own substance of experience. And the bee is the therapist as artist-transformer who synthesizes the good work of others and integrates it into something uniquely his own, so as to renew his clients, profession, and very self. The nation's mental health field needs gifted technicians of the inner life, creative intellectuals, and bold artist-transformers of the soul. Each of you throughout your career likely will shift among these roles as the therapeutic situation and your own spiritual evolution demand.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Dean, School of Holistic Studies