You may have noticed in my profile information that I have been relishing "My Grandfather's Blessings -- Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging" written by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D..
Life has been good to me. I enjoy a troupe of... well, I cannot call them children or kids... offspring sounds too formal and cold... Along with this talented, intelligent, creative and beautiful/handsome troupe are six grandchildren -- with number seven due to arrive in February.
Amongst all of this delightful fun and adventure, with a profession thrown in for good measure, I force myself to breath. How do I breath? Morning stretches to start. I never miss my morning stretches. To complete the intake and release process, I read whatever I consider insightful at the time and then journal. That reading and journaling, I have to admit, gets neglected.
When I set aside that extra time to complete my "breathing exercises", my morning meditation, my energy is increased immensely. A true reward.
This year, Rachel Remen's treasure trove, bound in the cover of "My Grandfather's Blessings", has touched me beyond and beyond. After every single reading, I want to share it with someone.
Today, I am dedicating the time to finally share one of the short, oh-so-meaningful chapters. This chapter is tucked in the middle of second section of the book, "Becoming a Blessing". The chapter is titled, "Bearing Witness":
After a dozen years, Alzheimer's disease had virtually destroyed Muriel's brain, erasing her memories and with them all of her sense of who she was. Confined to a nursing home, she was adrift and frightened, given to pacing back and forth in a seemingly endless fashion filled with a nameless anxiety. Such repetitive pacing is common in people at the last stages of this disease, almost as if they are being driven to search for something hopelessly lost.
All of the staff's efforts to ease her fear had failed. For a long time she was at rest only when she slept, and her unending movement had caused her to become painfully thin. Then one day, quite by accident, as she passed the full-length mirror that hung to the left of the door to the courtyard, she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass. Becoming still for the first time in many months, she stood before it, fascinated, an odd expression on her face. She looked as if she had just met a friend from long ago, someone whose face was vaguely familiar but whose connection to oneself cannot be immediately recalled.
As a result of her disease, Muriel had not spoken in many months. But drawn to the image in the mirror for reasons long forgotten, she began to speak to it in a language all her own. Day after day she would stand and talk to the woman in the mirror for hours on end. It made her calm.
The nurses welcomed this new behavior with relief. Her endless pacing and anxiety had made her very difficult to care for. Accustomed to much random senseless behavior on the part of their patients, they paid little further attention to how she now spent her time. But her doctor saw this differently. Every day on his rounds, he would stop at the mirror and spend some time with this patient. Standing next to her, he too would talk to the woman in the mirror with his usual kindness and respect. Once at the end of one of his longer chats with Muriel's reflection, he was deeply moved to notice that Muriel had tears in her eyes.
I was deeply moved as well. Unable to cure his patient's brutal disease, this true physician instinctively strengthened her last connection to herself with his simple presence and validated her worth as a human being.
Another colleague, a psychologist, told me this story. In the eighties, when she lived and practiced in New York City, she had decided to attend a two-day professional workshop based on twenty or so short films of one of Carl Jung's last pupils, the great Jungian dream analyst, Marie-Louise von Franz. Between the showing of these films, a distinguished panel consisting of the heads of two major Jungian training centers and Carl Jung's own grandson responded to written questions from the audience sent up to the stage on cards.
One of these cards told the story of a horrific recurring dream, in which the dreamer was stripped of all human dignity and worth through Nazi atrocities. A member of the panel read the dream out loud. As she listened, my colleague began to formulate a dream interpretation in her head, in anticipation of the panel's response. It was really a "no-brainer," she thought, as her mind busily offered her symbolic explanations for the torture and atrocities described in the dream. But this was not how the panel responded at all. When the reading of the dream was complete, Jung's grandson looked out over the large audience. "Would you all please rise?" he asked. "We will stand together in a moment of silence in response to this dream." The audience stood for a minute, my colleague impatiently waiting for the discussion she was certain would follow. But when they sat again, the panel went on to the next question.
My colleague simply did not understand this at all, and a few days later she asked one of her teachers, himself a Jungian analyst, about it. "Ah, Lois," he had said, "there is in life a suffering so unspeakable, a vulnerability so extreme that it goes far beyond words, beyond explanations and even beyond healing. In the face of such suffering all we can do is bear witness so no one need suffer alone."
Perhaps a willingness to face such shared vulnerability gives us the capacity to repair the world. Those who find the courage to share a common humanity may find they can bless anyone, anywhere.
And I breath....