Today we interacted with
Mission Australia in Sydney, but first, I awoke early and went running down
Manly Rd. through 3 km of forest.   A sign
read, "Wildlife", but I only saw road kill -- a possum, a snake, and a rat.   Australian drivers (Melbourne, Sydney, and
Gippsland is my sample space) never slow down, not for pedestrians, not for
other cars, not for bicycles, not for wildlife.  
I discovered that Sydney bicyclists at 6 am on a Saturday morning were
just as ruthless.   Well decked with
racing togs, they aimed straight at me and gave no ground along the shoulder of
the road.   I had to step aside into the
bush or they would have mowed me down.  
Imagine two headlights coming straight at you on the shoulder of the
road.   What's that care doing, driving on
the shoulder?   Is it some crazy man
trying to kill me?   No, as it gets
closer, I realize it's two bicycles riding parallel with no intention of
sharing the shoulder of the road with me despite catching me in their high beam
headlights.   Luckily, unlike the
wildlife, I survived Manly Road, though perhaps more ignobly than manly, and
returned to the house where we were staying in time to shower and pile into the
Subaru SUV to make the journey into downtown.

Mission Australia was
amazing!   I can't begin to say enough
about their services and commitment to the homeless and the poor!   They provide programming and shelter for
homeless adolescents and adults.   People
come for an initial period of 3 months.  
Some then transition to other spaces and others continue to stay.   Detox used to take place in the basement, but
it has moved to another building.  
Adolescents and actually anyone who lives in the vicinity can take
advantage of the many programs offered.  
They can access a center to help them find employment.   They can get dental and medical care
free.   They can use the computers and the
internet.   They can take yoga.   They can access a number of offerings about
the practicalities of life including managing a bank account, playing chess,
taking martial arts, writing a resume, and more.   They can take college courses through
Australia Catholic University's Catalyst Program.   On the bulletin board were notices for Intro
to Sociology, Intro to Art, Drawing 1, Graphics Art, and more.   We entered the building through the art
studio which was massive and full of amazing work.   I learned that people entered the building as
prostitutes and emerged as artists!   Their
work lined the walls and was deeply moving, highly artistic, and sometimes
disturbing.   From the art studio, we
entered a recording studio where clients could take a course that culminated in
their making a CD of their own music.   A
number of CD's were available for us to take.  
They were amazingly good!   This
studio was a project of our hostess's husband, Phil, who is both a musician and
a psychologist.   He serenaded us the
previous evening with his Fender Stratocaster guitar, apparently the same model
favored by the legendary blues musician, B.B. King.   The amount of program offerings and courses
was overwhelming.   I have never seen such
a comprehensive, integrated program in North America.

Mission Australia serves
many aboriginal people in a culturally sensitive manner.   Another of our hostesses, Sally de Beche, now
affiliated with Life Is"Foundation in Melbourne, used to work with Mission
Australia in Sydney.   As part of her work
she made a DVD documentary, Unsung
Heroes, the stories of aboriginal elders in Dubbo, New South Wales, sharing
their stories with young indigenous people.  
The DVD focuses on lost traditions, cultures, and experiences for young
people.   One of the elders didn't live in
a house until he was 10 years old and didn't have electricity.   He was concerned about bringing his friends
home because he lived in a tent.   One of
the young aboriginal people commented that he didn't even know how to go
camping.   It's about sharing verbal
stories which the elders were forbidden to pass to the young people.   Hence, a lot of young people are just
learning these stories which are not written down.   These stories explain for young people their
feelings of being lost or disconnected from culture.   This reconnects them with the source of their
traditions.   Sally told us how impressed
she was with the resilience of these people.

We began our workshop at
Mission Australia with a talking circle in which we heard people's wishes and
concerns and what they wanted to learn from us.  
Their focus was to learn new ways for dealing with psychological
suffering.   Sally talked about using mindfulness
and inner child work.   She mentioned a
grief and spirituality group that she and Tony Gee conducted at Life
Is"Foundation.   Everyone in that group
had lost a child, either to suicide, accident, or disease.   Using a talking circle format, people told
their stories to each other.  
Paradoxically, this became an uplifting experience in which they
connected with the link to "expansive reality".    Another participant wanted to learn about
the use of ceremony with clients.   A
third wanted to explore how to release ancestral pain.   I gave a short lecture about the post-modern,
narrative paradigm, which is remarkably similar to indigenous thought.   I also let people know, as I have done
everywhere we have gone during these two weeks, about the Narrative Medicine
and Psychology Program we are starting at Union Institute University in
the USA where I teach.   I talked about
how radical it is to see everything as a story, to move past the idea that some
explanations (stories) are more privileged than others or that there is a
"truth" out there waiting to be discovered.  
In this paradigm, I said, we realize that we are forever uncertain about
the nature of things.   We invent the best
stories we can and revise them as we go.  
In essence, this is Karl Popper's philosophy of science.   We make up stories to explain the actions of
the world around us.   Some of this
stories work better than others.

I talked about the Kaua'I
Longitudinal Study from Hawai'i, started in 1950, in which young children,
living in the most abject circumstances were followed to assess what would
happen to them.   The study continues
today, over 60 years later.   In the
1950's, the prediction was that everyone would be scarred for life and would
have a terrible outcome.   Actually, this
happened only to one-third of the children.  
Another third had perfectly normal lives, and the final third excelled
far beyond anyone's expectations and beyond the middle class children of the
area.   Mentoring made a huge difference,
sometimes even only briefly.   My point
was that trauma is not always indelible or irreversible.   Today, trauma is our new devil.   "Trauma made me do it," is the contemporary
story.   My point was that all truth
claims are suspect and subject to refutation.  
What matters is that I enter into the story of the client.   My story actually isn't very important and
pales in comparison to the story of the client.  
When I listen carefully to the client's story and enter into it, I can
move it along toward healing, toward reduction of suffering.

I also talked about how
Native North American culture is very present-centered.   The Lakota language does not have past or
future tenses.   The indication that
something is past or future is accomplished by a particle at the end of the
sentence, almost as an afterthought.  
Most of our pain happens when we live in the past or the future.   Focusing on the present reduces our pain
dramatically for the present moment is usually pretty comfortable.   Unfortunately, the default nature of our
brain is make stories.   That's good and
bad.   We use our large brains to generate
simulations of what people might do in various social situations given various
behaviors we could perform.   That's really
useful for being social animals but we can get carried away.   We can make story so much in the past or the
future that we drive ourselves crazy.  
Making story uses the least amount of glucose of any activity we
do.   To meditate requires much more
glucose.   Meditation is an effort.   We have to work to stop spinning yarns.   Though the effort is worthwhile.   When we stop making story and quiet our
minds, we realize life is good in this moment.

I also talked about the
similarity of Morita thought to Native American culture.   Morita viewed emotions as weather.   If you don't like what you are feeling, he
wrote, wait five minutes.   Definitely, he
said, if you are angry at someone and want to take revenge, wait three
days.   You will feel differently.  

I spoke about the Lakota
language having no word for "I".   There
are me's, but no I's.   The implication is
that we are defined by the group rather than ourselves.   As I have said before in these blogs, Lakota
has no self.   Being is composed of the nagi (all the stories that shape us and
the tellers of those stories), the s'icun
(our presence or what we feel when a person leaves the room or when we
enter the home of someone who is not there), the "breath of life" which makes
the air go in and out and the blood go round and round, and finally, the spark
of the Divine which lives within us.   "I"
is a story we construct to fit the social situation in which we find
ourselves.   We select from our many
"me's" to create an "I" which changes as the social situation changes or as we
evaluate the created "I" to see if it got what we wanted.   Hermans and Baumberg call this positioning.

I talked about North
American aboriginal thought seeing illness as more of a teacher and biomedicine
seeing it more as an enemy.     We continued our discussions and then a woman
volunteered to be interviewed.   I wanted
to demonstrate a narrative interview and the process by which we arrive at a
shared story or metaphor for the illness. This woman whom we will call Ursula
had migratory pain which rotated between her lower legs, elbows, neck,
shoulders, back, and hands.   I asked for her
explanatory story.    She said the doctors
said that she had an autoimmune process had created her pain.   Her other story was that she was carrying the
pain of her ancestors.   Medically she had
been diagnosed with celiac disease, sarcoidosis, and Sjogren's syndrome.   She said her pain had been present for as
long as she could remember.   As a small
child she spent time in the hospital frequently for injuries.   She dislocated joints, cut herself, sprained
herself, and on and on.   Between
incidents she felt ok.   I inquired about
her carrying the pain of her ancestors.  
How did she arrive at that idea?  
She said, from reading, feeling that it fit, and knowing what she
knew.   "I carry their stuff.   Not with my permission except I must have
agreed on some level."

"What is this stuff?" I
asked.

"Negativity, dysfunction,
emotional pain, physical pain."   She said
that she was carrying something that" I can feel but cannot see.   It's a heaviness in body, a weight, a
darkness, a blackness."   I remarked that
this stuff was hard to see.   That you
couldn't pet it, touch it, or see it.   It
didn't walk across the lawn.   You
couldn't eat it and it couldn't eat you.  
(This was one elder's definition of "real" for me.)

Ursula went on to tell
about her childhood physical abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from other
family members.   Those experiences led
her to feel unloved, disrespected, and not allowed to live a life free from
danger.   At age 17, she left home.   From then on, she lived in a manner in which
she felt loved, respected, and free from danger.   She said she was confused because she'd tried
forgiveness and that hadn't worked.   She
believed this was because she had more healing to do.   I asked her if she had talked to her pain or
her joints.   She had, she said, but they
were strangely silent.     I poked at her
story in various ways, trying to understand her assumptions. I'd have to watch
the video or read the transcript to understand how we got there, but we arrived
at a shared metaphor of Ursula and this stuff as a painting with her standing
in the middle of a dark and gloomy, bleak landscape without any color, and full
of shame and pain.   The music playing was
from Sibelius -- ponderous and solemn.  
The painting was kept in a back room, away from the exhibition space of
the museum.   Its only audience consisted
of her husband and her two best women friends.  
Nobody else was allowed to see it. "I have other paintings," she said.

"What are they?"

"I have a beautiful
painting of me at the seashore in a tropical environment with deep blue water
and light blue sky.   I have another
painting of me in a forest surrounded by animals and my dogs.   These are my happy paintings.   We talked about the concept of the
desirability of being pitiable, as in worthy of others' pity.   I told Ursula that back home on the Rez
instead of hiding the gloomy painting out of side, a person might put it up on
a billboard outside for everyone to see because of the desirability of being
worthy of pity.   Aboriginal participants
agreed that this fit Australian local culture, too.  

"You see," I said, "in
dominant white culture you learn to hide your misery and shame and pain, but in
other cultures, you bring it out for everyone to see as your legacy, your
badges of courage, your medals of honor.  
You can be proud of how you have suffered because on some level, you do
it for the community.

Then we had our lunch
break.

After lunch my task was
to demonstrate to the participants how I would create a ceremony for Ursula in
an office space in which I couldn't burn sage or tobacco or any of my other
tricks.   All I could do was sing and
talk.   Rocky assisted me.   Her ancestors (insert "My intuition if you
don't believe in spirits) told me that they had a hard life and lived in great
hardship.   Then we sang an invocation
song, invited her ancestors to join us, sang an honoring song for them, and
then invited Ursula to tell positive stories about them.   This proved to be very difficult.   "How do you expect them to come if you only
tell negative stories?" I asked.   This
was a new concept to Ursula.   She
struggled and slowly found positive stories to tell about her mother,
grandmother, grandfather, brother, uncle, and great-grandfather.   Once we had some positive stories, I could
ask them to speak through anyone present in the room.

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