Be The RiverWelcome to this second podcast from The Wisdom Distillery with Helen J Butlin.
Listen to it here on: Soundcloud
Meditation to go with it: Be The River
This podcast has an accompanying meditation also titled “Be The River” that you can find on my website helenjbutlin.com or just by googling Be The River with my name. And this podcast offers a bonus poem at the end with a river theme called Quan Yin, as well.
Finally, it’s April and the earth is warming, sun is peeking through more often and the flowers are showing the blooms. Joy glimmers abound in spring for me. It’s also the time of year where in the northern hemisphere, the rivers are filling with rain water and snow melts so this river theme swirled for this month’s podcast sharing wisdom drawn from nature’s way in life.
Lately, I’ve been sharing a teaching learned long ago when working in health care systems and meeting barriers. “Be the river, water flows around the rocks” was my daily mantra through some really tough years in institutional health care practice. I want to share this story of how I really sunk into this as a practice and a rudder that guided me every day through the enormous challenges and often frustrating situations. All of course, forming the hard won gold of becoming wiser and less grasping of how things should be according to my view and better able to see the crazy wisdom underneath all of it – eventually anyway.
“Be the River” was such an anchor and helped me to remember when the currents are pushing against the direction you are trying to go in, pay attention, don’t force it, go with the flow and its direction. Those who know me, know that this is not been my nature nor my general way of going about things. It’s taken time to truly learn this more easeful and less grasping way of living life and to pay attention to the flow in my approach to the day, week, project.
In my health care years, in the oncology Supportive Care role I reminded myself every day to trust the process of building from foundation up a referral-based program. It included individual counselling and the support groups I formed, Soul Medicine for Living with Cancer. It was an uphill slog to get the traction within the system for this to become an embedded part of patient treatment and not simply one they could access if they were lucky enough to ‘hear’ about it from someone. The most often spoken phrase I heard once a person found my door and counselling role was, “Oh I wish I’d known about you sooner.” It got very disheartening after around year five of efforts to get the awareness fully embedded into patient treatment pathways. It wasn’t due to an absence of goodwill from many willing collaborators. I just learned a lot about unwieldy and difficult-to-move-into-change cumbersome institutional systems can be, even when an initiative is valued by patients and many staff and truly adds value to people’s ‘care’ in their health care, it can still somehow meet invisible yet potent barriers for integration. It can feel personal and I learned sometimes it might be and sometimes it is just the nature of large systems. “Be the river” helped me have an anchor to navigate both with greater and lesser grace and ease but winding my way from one next step to another.
It was harder than anything I’d experienced before in my previous health care work. Yet patients and fellow staff kept saying how valuable the patients found the program and support and aided my efforts with their word of mouth, referring patients to the groups and counselling sessions. Slowly, over 5 years, it grew from one patient to over 200 referrals in the fifth year. From there, my program, Soul-Medicine for Living with Cancer went on to be presented at an international conference in Psycho-Oncology presenting the benefits that were consistently being named in patient evaluations after I’d facilitated 10 groups for women and men. The reported feeling less afraid or no fear at all of dying, able to move back to living in the present when fears of suffering or loss gripped them, improved relationships, able to accept what can’t be controlled, not sweating the small stuff, more appreciation for life lived today, greater ability in self-care and saying no, more inner peace.
Confidence bolstered I then took my presentation to ask a physician-researcher how to do a research study on these immensely valuable themes emerging from the groups to try to demonstrate how this could potentially be replicated beyond me, the one person “Helen” doing the work into a program that could be embedded in other oncology programs in Ontario. He offered to supervise a doctoral study on the spot saying I’d do that much work anyway, may as well get a PhD for the trouble. While it made zero sense at 43 and till raising, then, adolescent children and working close to full time, the PhD began (2013) because my heart said a resounding ‘yes’ and I’ve learned not to mess with the voice of my inner drum. And what a journey the doctoral process was. Nothing happened that was expected and my life was 100% radically changed and quite turned upside down by the end in 2018. All part of the crazy wisdom that is most akin to the ‘way of the river’. I see the serpentine river path snaking through my doctoral journey now, in hindsight, from a more birds eye view but the process was quite something.
The doctoral research focus was on ‘wisdom’ and what the perspectives of women living ovarian cancer were experiencing with the direct confrontation facing their mortality yet still having to live daily life as best they could. The women had each participated in the wisdom priming support group, Soul-Medicine for Living with Cancer. They volunteered when approached by a third party who presented a clear option to decline. The voluteers who said yes agreed contribute two 90 minute interviews on their perspectives on ‘wisdom’ from their lived experiences.
In the opening of the first interview they each professed, quite emphatically, to having no sense of much wisdom to offer and this fit the research for we all have bias against believing ourselves wise. In fact, it is the nature of the wise one, to not see or claim their wisdom as ‘wise’. Wisdom makes itself opaque to us for it to be its true nature of wise.
Yet, by the end of the second interview, they were sharing a wealth of wisdom through, as one woman named it ,“the wisdom dialogue” with the semi-structured questions and conversation, sharing their gleanings. In fact, they each noticed that they had learned a different way of living each day, inside their inner world and in how they embodied their process of living through each day. Something quite deep and rich had changed, even though they shared that they still felt great distress at times, some days were very difficult and at times completely overwhelmed with grief and fear, particularly for their families and close friends. Yet, they had each formed, almost out of awareness, a ‘way’ unique to their temperaments of following a rather river like wisdom, flowing through, guiding, nudging and forming a process that aided them to move through those moments and beyond them into the present, now, where life was still waiting for them, today. They knew what to do with those experiences and how to live with compassion and care for themselves.
The participants in my interviews offered a rich gestalt of insights and wisdom on living life, in general, not just when living with cancer. They confirmed for me Carl Jung’s insights on the psyche, long taken up in my own life and therapy practice that the human psyche, having evolved through billions of years of adaptation and meeting radical change and challenges, has a deep, wise, calibrating centre to it, he called it the Self, sometimes I call it a ‘wisdom-compass’ that guides, calibrates, and holds onto a sense of intuited wholeness in life like the north star. This wisdom-compass is the psyche’s embodied, imaginal, reflective, intuitive, feeling orientated inner life. Harness this, we can be like the river, flowing through, in and around anything.
The method I developed for harnessing the participant’s own, unseen and hidden wisdom in their conversation with me honed my tacit method that I use in my therapy sessions of paying attention to the image centred wisdom of the inner life and unconscious. This means the image-centred phrases, analogies, rising out of being embodied ways of knowing that dwell within our words and speech and absolutely out of our awareness for the most part.
Carl Jung showed this image centred layer of the psyche as a foundation for language and consciousness in human life and it provides a nourishing, sustaining, compensatory and calibrating capacity for wisdom to navigate our conscious, upper world lives. I agree with Jung after years of practicing psychotherapy and working with people in very difficult, sometimes, dire situations, including my own process in my life journey. This “wisdom-compass” seems to dwell deep in our human psyche. It is our human birthright to access it within. “Be the river” is one helpful shortcut, providing a nourishing and wise image that conveys and evokes the very phenomenon we need to live in a way that harnesses this wise-way of living life flowing with our own nature and not against it, flowing with the currents, not forcing and grasping.
The fact that my life was basically 100% turned upside down and was completely different by the end of my doctoral process than at the beginning might not look like there was a wisdom at all functioning in it from the outside. I myself haven’t and didn’t trust that there might be many, many times. Yet, always hindsight allows for the threads to be seen that were pulling through all the twists and turns, weaving of this way and that, following instinct, intuition, feeling my way, often fumbling, sometimes making what seemed like epic ‘fail’ mistakes. However, the thread pulling through, had its own crazy, unseen wisdom to it, forming me, forming the process, forming what came from it all. My life, this me today living and flowing on.
This is the way of the psyche and specifically the wisdom dwelling deep out of our awareness, there to be connected with and harnessed – if we listen, turn within and rehabilitate our intuitive, feeling world within.
And this is where the wisdom of the river comes in. The psyche is organic, it is nature, we – are nature. Yet we live in a society that lives as if it is a Roman highway that can blast its way in a straight line through anything. This can be done, for a short time but it uses an enormous amount of life energy and resources, personal and collective. It is not sustainable for our organic limits.
“The highway and my way approach” in society creates and rewards those with goals, objectives, plans, targets and the ability to achieve them. It assumes we humans are able, if we just focus enough and work hard enough, to achieve said goals and goods in a linear, sequential, expedited manner. Humans more and more have become economic units in a large, large spider web of economy, trading life, our sense of self into its own ends which are not about the humane, or the common good for earth and humans sharing resources and health.
A life lived mentally planning in forward motion tends to lose touch to the richness of noticing the joy moments, being able to have the resting state in the body to enjoy slow time, enjoy a sense of being rather than becoming. These are way out of balance for us in the Euro-American moulded societies.
The river has a lot to teach us and I find it is a teacher for the way of the psyche par excellence. The river way, in one’s imaginal life feeling into it as a visceral experience ‘be the river’ as an image form of medicine for body and mind to feast on and be nourished, guided by – it can change how a day feels, truly.
The river in earth’s immense wisdom that is a truly an economical economy of reciprocity, if left to its own wisdom, uses the least amount of energy to get to the ocean – and it always gets to the ocean. It always takes some things up in its movement and leaves some things behind on its banks and floodplains. The river is not greedy or hoarding. River shrinks and expands with what it meets and with the gradient of its underneath side, much as Jung said the unconscious life, the life we can’t grasp with our tiny conscious cognition guides and lives us, on our underneath world, within. River has many different forms depending on its current environment and the shape of the banks and land it meets – be it becoming rapids over slopes and many rocks, or wide slow turns on sweeping plains feeling its way around the lay of the land finding the easeful path.
If you pause to reflect on the movements of your own phases and stages in life. Every single experience has something in it that shapes something within us. We leave old habits, patterns or sometimes people behind in each phase. In some we take up new insights, direction, nourishments of soul and heart in each new environment or relationship. In other phases, we lie fallow, slow moving, seemingly nothing much happening. That’s rivers way because it is nature’s way.
“Be the river” teaches us a lot of different skills. If you’re in a high surge of many things, as in rapids, the rule is “Keep Paddling” in white water rafting. If you’re becalmed, get your sails ready, keep your boat tidy so you’re ready to catch the next wind of change. If you’re in a slow-moving phase of daily life, not much going on, not much happening, be the river slowly winding your way through the stuff and things of your day knowing there are micro-nutrients being taken up and left in the soil of your psyche for the new rush of life to flow through in the next change of the winds breezing through your world. And most of all, learn to enjoy the slow time while you have it – for nothing ever stays the same. River will whisper that whenever you listen to a river.
You can try meditating using the imagery of “being river” and give your nervous system the healing and powerful medicine of imagery to shape new experiences deep within your body’s neural networks and pathways. Imagine a slow, lazy moving curving Mississippi-like-body and movement. Then imagine being the bubbling brook dancing joyfully down the hill. Reflect on your life at the moment and find a ‘river analogy’ about what phase you’re in and thus, what the teachings and practices are for this phase. Images are powerful neural network shapers, Jung knew certain images in our dreams are the Healing Image – the one with densest possible medicine for our deepest wounds. Use the ones that heal your sense of being bring sense of soothing, fit where you are just right. Images bring much and come right out of our depths, our wise self within – if we pay attention. Nature is one living breathing image-bodied-wisdom. Be the river is a good place to start to practice this image-nervous-system-shaping medicine for psyche, body, heart.
In the end, learning the way of wisdom is learning to play with a flexible mind that doesn’t get stuck in the One Story about yourself or your life. The wise mind learns to anchor into imagery and trust the threads of your way in life, trust that deep wise centre of your human psyche that is the way of nature in and through you. And especially pays attention to the imagery rising from within your own psyche hidden in your journal, speech, conversation, thoughts, mind’s eye ‘seeing’ about things. Using imagery, such as really feeling into ‘river’ and what it would be like to be like the river in your particular situation or struggle. This can give you a much easier access point to your wisdom-compass and hearing the specific and tangible wisdom your psyche can offer for this moment and this challenge.
It may not make rational sense but I can certainly say that practicing “be the river” walking around the halls of my oncology treatment centre and meeting so many system barriers and obstacles was probably one of the central and crucial ingredients that allowed for all that came from those years, to emerge into the life I’m living today. It is a life that I’m somewhat amazed emerged from all the crazy ups and downs and I am deeply grateful for those years and the journey, thanks to the wisdom of the river being such a subtle but ever present teacher and those who loved and cared for me along the way.
This wisdom is in you too. It’s our human birthright from millennia of surviving and adapting as a species on this planet. Trust your process, trust your crazy wisdom underneath it all, and listen deeply to your inner compass.
Try the practice this month imagining, “Be The River”.
See where it takes you.
You might be surprised!