The Importance of Listening to the Inner Landscape

At the end of March, 2010, my world turned upside down. My father became critically and then terminally ill with what we would find out months later to be the result of lymphoma. I left my full-time job as director of the Center for Body-Mind Therapy to become one of his full-time, very hands-on primary caregivers.

Those last few words may leave you (if you’re not a caregiver) with a surface, sanitized impression – one that tends to bespeak a very clean, very ordered reality. I don’t want to leave you with such an impression. It wouldn’t serve. It wouldn’t be true. To authentically enter into the healing journey of a caregiver, we have to be willing to break through the veneer of surface and sanitized. We must acknowledge the fullness and depth of our life experiences. We must give due dignity to the utter humanness and messiness of it all.

For me, the fullness of experience that shifting into a life of caregiving brought was worlds away from clean and ordered. My experience was infused with an intensity of life that increased as the days and weeks and months passed. With the increasing intensity, I deftly managed to disconnect from my body. I expertly turned off listening to the impact that intensity was having on my body, living wholly focused on my father’s experiences, his illness, his day-to-day needs.

I was full-throttle in the midst of a life too big. It was filling my body full of experiences and stories and trauma. I needed to take time to take care of myself, to listen to my body, to heal. But I didn’t. I refused to listen. I wanted to stay disconnected from my body despite the fact that I knew that refusing to listen to it would not be an option forever.

Our bodies have a quality of persistence built into their nature. They are on our side, after all, and they will be heard. They’ll usually start by whispering. But if that fails to get our attention, they’ll start to talk more loudly. They’ll continue to increase the volume until we tune in and listen – even if it moves us into high drama, creating a soap-operatic moment, to get us to take that necessary pause and give an ear to our own stories, to our own life.

True to form, my body was sending signals to me the whole time, trying to get me to listen. First it was the exhaustion. Then it was the tension in my muscles, followed by the pain in my back. In the end, it was the tightness and pain constricting my breath that brought me to my knees. With one hand pressing against my chest and the other holding onto the wall, supporting my collapsing body, I finally faced the reality that it was time for me to start to listen to all that was happening for me inside my body, inside my mind.

Band-Aids for the Storm

Life-too-big is often just life in this world. It doesn’t have to be anything out of the ordinary. It doesn’t have to be anything as highly focused as a critical illness or giving care to someone who is critically ill. Life-too-big simply has to be life-out-of-the-moment. Then when we don’t see it for what it is, life-too-big starts to take us down its slippery slope.

In the architecture of our giving care to the one we love, we need to keep in mind that life-too-big isn’t actually the force or fuel that drives us to stop listening to our bodies. Like a hurricane, life-too-big is akin to the clouds and rain and wind that swirl around the eye of the storm. It creates distraction and often harbors potential to harm anything or anyone in its path. What allows this storm to maintain its form and to continue to grow in intensity is the energetic dynamic of our not accepting what is happening as that which is actually happening. In our not accepting, we are choosing not to listen. We are choosing not to see the situation for what it is as it is being revealed to us through our experience.

If we can make a shift and open up to listening without judgment, without a need to fix, without a need to change, then we are choosing to walk into the space of acceptance. This type of listening is almost alchemical in nature. As we invoke it, we assent to the next step: entering into liminal space that naturally supports our authentic healing. The tragedy emerges when we, as active caregivers, have experiential knowledge of the healing potential of listening yet choose not to listen to our own bodies, choose not to move into liminal space.

The potential casualties are many. In my case, they were most often my critically and terminally ill father as well as my own self. By sacrificing authenic listening, I was sacrificing my body, my mind, my health, my peace. In turn, I was never truly present to my father’s needs nor my own. Instead events more often triggered me, leading me to more often project anger and resentment onto my father. These same energetic dynamics can all too easily continue to unfold in all of our relationships and interactions. Regardless of how subtle they are, these same dynamics are nonetheless in motion, along with their inherent potential outcomes.

It’s often true that during the intense and big moments of life, listening seems like it’s just another too big part of life – one that we either don’t have time for, or don’t have energy for, or both. The bigger picture revelation is that the reason, whatever it may look like, most often amounts to a maladaptive coping strategy on our part: a way to just get through the day in one piece. It’s one that ends up being at best a band-aid for the moment, and all too frequently, it lulls us into thinking it is exactly what we need to heal through our life-too-big. In actuality, we end up moving ourselves further and further off the path of listening and further away from any hope of getting clear about our stories, about our stuff, and about our truths. In short, we lose any possibility of moving into the liminal space of authentic healing.

The Necessary Pause

Several questions of value for us to keep in mind include: What is the story underneath the smoke screens? What is making us turn away from listening until the moment our bodies are virtually screaming at us? To find these answers, to invoke listening, doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time or energy. It does, however, require a necessary pause.

In my particular situation, the necessary pause and my opening up to authentic listening revealed that my story beneath the story was one of false humility. It was as if tuning into my body or taking time for myself would be too self-indulgent given the fact that my father rarely, if ever, found relief from his pain. If he was constantly on because of pain, I needed to be constantly on, too. Such an intricately ornamented martyr complex, or any variation of it, is one that can find its home all too easily in the bodies and minds of caregivers. It can also show up in one form or another in anyone working in a healing profession. Smoke screens like these can be seductive. For as real as they feel, they are still only smoke screens keeping us from that closer approximation of the truth of what is and keeping us from real healing.

In the final assessment, any caregiving or therapeutic experience is one of relationship. It’s a relationship between us and the person we’re caring for or holding space for as well as a relationship between us and our very selves. Not being able to admit our needs from the standpoint of our humanness robs us. It robs us of our ability to be fully present for the person we’re caring for. Most importantly, it robs us of our ability to be fully present for ourselves. Giving in full measure all the attention and respect that are due the act of listening is a necessary part of our own healing journey. If we neglect this, we will become caught up in a swirling storm of a life-too-big. We will not be able to be fully present for the other. We will not be able to honor the dignity of the person we are providing care for. We will not be able to heal through our own pain and trauma.