Heartwork

On Rethinking the Role of the Self in the Healers’ Paradox

“It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I am a member of the healing tribe. But until last week my healing paradigm rested on a fallacy.

I was born into this tribe. For me, healing starts at home. But formally learning “how to do it” has been a journey of forgetting everything I was taught and getting back to what I knew at the beginning.

In the Beginning

I first started doing bodywork as a child when I figured out that if I rubbed my mom’s feet at bedtime I could stay up later. And I was doing counseling long before that. There is the anecdote of toddler-me in my mom’s arms; she was crying, and I reached around and patted her on the back and said, “be ok!”

As far as energy work, I was born into a family of witches. Energy work and practical magic were everyday realities.

Back when healing was about mother kisses on boo-boos (scientifically proven efficacious), or gossiping with friends about relationships, or rubbing the backs of the boys we had crushes on, we didn’t know anything about “grounding” or “boundaries.” We just did it, and we did it with love. Love and healing went together. We never consider separating the two.

Healing with love is what humans do.

Hogwarts

But then I went to many different Hogwarts-esque places of formal instruction, and everything became drills about Grounding and Healthy Boundaries and training ourselves to become ciphers. In western and eastern modalities, for body, energy, and mind work (as if they were separate, which they’re not), we were always strictly instructed to check ourselves at the door. The Self of the practitioner had no place in the healing environment. We were here to serve, and when we were doing a session, the session was All About the Client. The worst taboo we could break was to bring ourselves into the equation.

In Reiki we recited, like the catechism of little Reikibots, “the energy is through me, it is not of me.” Important for empaths, so we could go home without taking the office with us, but….

In karate we learned to keep the ego out of sparring, never to allow our feelings to interfere with our process, and never to attack in anger. We learned to act, not to react. Which is important…but can also lead to denial of the Self.

In Zero Balancing, we learned how to be “donkeys,” which meant, we learned how to be present without overlapping, leaking, or sucking energy. I am all in favour of defending one’s self against energy vampires, and not being one either. However, all those healthy boundaries also meant that we didn’t share the client’s experience.

In tango we learned, “with me but on your own” — how to be totally independent all the time and never need anybody for balance or support; how to be the ideal zero-maintenance girlfriend. How to give the warm snuggles that should be earned through trust, without the other party having done anything to deserve these snuggles.

In Swedish and Shiatsu we learned to ground our energy all the time and keep our empathic psychic-sponge selves out of the other person, because we didn’t want to go home with their sore shoulder. We learned all kinds of snapping and hand-washing rituals. We learned about pink salt crystals and Palo Santo.

In Thai we learned prayers that opened and closed formal sacred spaces for the client’s needs, and the client’s experience.

In pranayama it was all about “we need to work on your boundaries.” Years later that I realized my mentor had been right but wrong. She wanted me to clean the apartment and eat three wholesome meals every day (when some days I only felt like two, and other days I felt like four), and said that because of these sorts of behaviours, my boundaries were too porous. But years later I realized that actually, the boundaries that mattered to me, my social boundaries, were too rigid. I was great about yes, no, black, white, open, closed, but had no idea how to be consciously flexible.

In psychotherapy we didn’t even have to be told once that transference was the Devil’s playground.

That’s all great. Without boundaries there can be no river. I am in favour of the healthy side of “it’s just business.” My own approach to healing practices is that of a veterinarian Dr House, with a little lock-picker thrown in. I don’t think of myself as a “compassionate,” “gentle,” or “nurturing” person, and certainly not a “caring” one, although I have been known to exhibit these traits. Their over-prevalence in healing crafts has always bored me. I prefer solving puzzles. And there are plenty of times when an intellectual approach to the question at hand is an effective solution.

Sometimes, “it’s not personal” is the truth of a situation, and that’s great.

But sometimes it’s not the whole truth.

The dark side to this world of rigidly-enforced picking and choosing between truths is as poisonous as the light side is salubrious.

What’s easy and convenient is not always the same as what’s simple and right.

Self-Erasing

A witchy bodyworker yoga teacher friend of mine was recently complaining about the “self-erasing” nature of these practices. Always having to show up as a nonperson, a voiceless tool, got tiring. Where was there room for her in this equation? If the session was all about the client, where was there a place for Zoë?

I asked myself: was fostering a client-practitioner nonversation the healthiest possible approach to healing?

Especially for women. Bodywork schools are packed with women, whom society has been telling for millennia to shut up, deny themselves, and cater to the needs of everyone in the whole world except themselves. Society has been telling women for millennia that in order to deserve the air they breathe and the ground under their feet, that they have to be “nurturing,” “gentle,” “soft,” “sweet,” and “nice.” Society has been telling women for millennia that they don’t deserve a place in the conversation, they don’t deserve the validation of their own voice, and they don’t deserve to share experiences.

Was it healthy for society to have so many women funnelling into crafts that exacerbated this preaching?

I had recently been telling a friend about spring in Russia, when all the young lovers were kissing in Red Square. He asked if I had been tempted to take part and I didn’t even know how to hear the question. Didn’t he know I was invisible, the Storyteller, the Artist, the Healer, the outsider on the sidelines, observing but never taking part in the action? The world happened around me, but I was not in the world.

I had written about a local gypsy fiddler several times in my two books about Berlin street life, but it never occurred to me that she could see me too, until one day after nearly a year, I walked by and she said, with the familiar tones of someone who knows someone, “HALLO!” ….Only then did I realize that I was an integral part of the street life about which I wrote.

I realized it was false to leave myself out of the world, when I was just as much a part of this Shinto jewelled web as the next person. If I left myself out of my understanding of the web, the web would fall apart.

Tantra

Then one day a Trusted Friend™ introduced me to tantric philosophy. We just dabbled one tiny toe in that ocean, but I only needed that dabble to see that not only was this practice built on everything that was usually expressly forbidden in healing practices, but that this was a skeleton key that unlocked everything that lay at the heart of all healing work.

Tantra was heartwork.

I hadn’t understood that until I felt it, but when I felt it, I knew that that’s what it was.

I had often wondered why it was that we talked about bodywork, energy work, and psychotherapy (mindwork), but we never talked about heartwork. Such a discipline didn’t seem to exist. And yet, fruity, hippie, liberal-arts-loving, humanitarian flower-children that we were, we were all constantly espousing the passive, incidental virtues of love, as if it were parsley to add to a dish, not the dish itself.

Share the love! Make love not war! Can you feel the love tonight!

Even my own mantra (stolen from EM Forster) was only half-digested. “Only connect.” I said it all the time. I said that this was the crux of all healing work, and yet, there I was, the best student ever, the winner of the Grounding and Healthy Boundaries Gold Star, so good at keeping my business out of other people’s business, believing that the only way to do right by my clients was to do wrong by myself. Or at least, the only way to free their best voices into the world was by silencing mine.

Not that I may have grown up in some abusive households where the only way to stay safe was to remain silent, voiceless, and needless. Or anything. And not that this might be a common through-line amongst many healers.

Or anything.

We healers loved to talk about love and then we went right back into our highly trained autopilots that told us we had to leave love out. If we cared about doing a good job for our clients, it was our job not to care!

I had initially set up my website for my practice, Xin Healing Arts, Whole Human Healing, into nominal separations for body, mind, heart, and soul. While filing modalities under different headers it hit me that “heart” was a funny category, that lay at the intersection of everything and yet also wasn’t addressed anywhere.

Where was there room for the heart, in any of the Fancy Stuff I had studied?

Where was there room for my heart, in any of this?

And how could we healers be of use to anyone if our hearts were literally and intentionally not in our work?

I used to be a tango dancer. But I quit a year ago. Mostly because I would show up and embrace a man and most of the time he would demand the unearned fruits of my trust while either doing nothing to deserve this trust or actively destroying it. They often didn’t dance with their hearts, so there I was, all alone in somebody’s arms, doing all the emotional labor for both halves of the couple, exactly as women have been doing off the dance floor for millennia. We’ve all been so conditioned to expect this as normal that it took a long time to realize that this was even happening, and that I did not have to be ok with this.

So after landing flat on my heart in the dirt enough times, I decided I had had enough of this. If I wanted to be alone, I could do that by myself much more safely and much more inexpensively.

And now here I was, discovering a tiny corner of tantra, this brand-new-to-me toy that was as ancient as the sutras. This new toy was contingent on everybody showing up for the experience, not just some of the people. This was the battery that made the toy go. Without everybody showing up and bringing themselves into the experience, nothing happened.

My Trusted Friend™ had told me that he did this practice back when I first settled in Berlin. I was surprised, because he was a smart, highly educated, and financially-doing-ok kind of guy, and I associated the word “tantra” with desperate immigrants who would otherwise starve. Back in San Francisco plenty of men had asked me if I did it when I told them I was a bodyworker, and I had always said, “no, I am a real bodyworker,” and then when they disappeared and never spoke to me again, I’d allow myself an “ugh.” Because the word was code, language misused to point to things it didn’t mean, over time becoming codified into the wrong thing so that people didn’t even know they were misusing it. Here in Berlin (the home of the western invention called “tantric massage”), Craigslist was swarming with desperate Slavic adolescents who would give you a hand job for a tenner and call it tantra. Or there were places saying they were looking for bodyworkers that were actually looking for cheap whores (unskilled cheap whores at that), or worse, unskilled cheap whores willing to pay for “training”…as long as they were between “18” and 26 and had long blonde hair and all the right measurements.

But then I’d listen to my TF™ and I’d think, “but aha, there is much deep wisdom and much power in the theory of this practice. Can we mere mortals handle this degree of philosophy? Bhakti is a great force for healing and change in the world! We all have a snake at the bottom of our spines that’s in charge of important stuff, and unless we address the snake, everything else is irrelevant! How profound! How real! How True!

The world needs this!”

I always get excited when I encounter the Truth, and want to hunt down more of it, like a Truth-Seeking Mongoose. And when I get the Truth between my jaws, I love to tussle with it like a dog with its favourite chew toy.

But then I read the web-site for the place where he said he had learned, and they wanted many euros for training, and I was like, “I’m broke, man, and plus, is there any point to putting many euros I don’t have into a practice that starving whores are giving away for nearly-free, I can’t compete with that. Plus…eww. I am all about getting paid for work, but this is a mighty squidgy overlap of practice and money.”

Plus, even the people at theoretically reputable places were making suspiciously crappy money doing this thing that was supposed to be so valuable and deep and wise, and I felt like, it’s already weird that you’re selling it at all, and then, to sell it for so little ices the No Thank You Cake.

Then I was in Santa Cruz hanging out with my witchy yoga teacher bodyworker friend and borrowing her copy of the Thread Sutras and reading about what tantra was supposed to be. I was like, “see, this is why you can’t sell it. Look at this. It’s all over the sutras. Tantra is a shared communion of love that unites souls with the greater universal energy of love. It’s right there in Sanskrit (and Matthew Remski’s superlatively readable translation). It is a celebration of the beauty of truth and an opportunity to consciously share the shining jewel of reality with another version of your own self. It is the completion of the circuit of light and shadow, it is an exalted state of simplicity in which we lay down our armor and allow ourselves to experience the electric bond of joy with another that reminds us that we are all one giant cosmic shimmery rainbow.”

The minute you try to sell that, it dies. It’s fake. It’s its opposite.

A practice based on truth becomes the ultimate lie.

Maybe some 1967 Woodstock Aquariuses, set on loving the whole world, could pull it off. But I personally could not and I don’t think I know anyone who could, not if they were being honest with themselves, and that honesty in the heart is supposed to be the root of tantra. I don’t even like a lot of people. I don’t even want to be in the same room as them, let alone open my heart and touch them with love.

So I was back to, “tantra, like Communism, is a nice idea in theory. But in practice it can’t be real, and therefore, it’s one more way of saying, Berlin is jam-packed with sex workers, some of whom misuse labels.”

But then I found out that if you weren’t selling it, and all the conditions were lined up just right, in very particular circumstances, it could be real.

And when it was real, it was exactly the force for unleashing the cosmic uniting flow of the universe that I had suspected it would be.

And the power driving its usefulness was exactly what was left out of all the other disciplines: the heart. The force that connects us with the rest of the world.

Heartwork

I went home and threw out my old ideology. This made too much sense. How could anybody heal if their experience with a practitioner was one of intensified loneliness-in-the-crowd?

And, if we really are all part of the same thing, different parts of One, then any paradigm that denies or abnegates one part in purported service to another is perpetuating an imbalance, and solving nothing. Organisms out of balance are organisms who have not healed anything. Shifting an imbalance just wastes energy.

Also, we learn by mirroring, mirror neurons are responsible for a large amount of information downloading, and behavior acquisition often takes place on an unconscious level. So to show up for a client as a nonperson, a cipher, someone who checked their character and their voice at the door and who is only here as a servant, not as an equal participant in a shared experience, encourages this unconscious behaviour in exactly the people we’re trying to help.

I realized that we had all been disserving humanity the whole time we had been trying to help. Our job was not to check ourselves at the door, but rather to show up with an honest heart, and instead of erasing ourselves to create the conditions for a monologue, to engage in an equally shared conversation.

In order to affect evolution, we had to allow ourselves to evolve.

And that last word, “help.” We had been trained never to say “help;” rather to say “serve.” I had always hated that word, and now I felt justified. I didn’t want to be anybody’s servant. I didn’t want to be some invisible pair of hands fanning the Mem Sahib with a palm frond. I wanted to be a present participant in a mutual journey toward a better future.

Realizing that tantra was a critical tool that would fit well into my philosophical tool box was not a helpful realization, because I already had way too many not-for-money projects, and also, realizing that you could not sell it also meant that you could not learn it in classes either. I didn’t “need” to learn a new discipline that I would only ever use with a few people, if they were Very Lucky. But it interested me.

Tantra was the Tao of Love. How more potent of a force for the creation of better life could you possibly get.

I could take the principles and apply them to the rest of life. Especially as a woman, I owed it to the world to model this self-presenting, sharing-the-conversation behaviour as the new normal. And not to settle for less.

Healing needed to be a conversation, not a nonversation.

Life needed to be a conversation.

So I decided that from then on, the default truth-setting in my life would be this new word I had just made up, and I would seek the company of people who were doing this work, in whatever way suited them.

Heartwork.

Raven Symone. True to Your Heart. Mulan.