Illness may initiate transformations of soul

Today, Family Nurturing Tree Blog reprints Sonia Osorio's "The Transformative Power of Trauma – From Damaged Goods to an Empowered Life" that appears in Massage & Bodywork magazine, April-May 2001. Osorio quotes Thomas Moore:

"Soul pours forth from our wounds ... [The places of our] punctures and violations are areas of potential intimacy between us and those we love, even though on the surface they may seem to be precisely the areas of mistrust." Thomas Moore wrote these words in his book Soul Mates (Harper Collins, 1994), and the lines remind us that, after a wounding, sometimes the most difficult thing is to allow life to flow back into the very place where it once hurt us the most — to trust and open our body, ourselves, once again. The areas where we have been cut into, opened, bled, bruised, torn and otherwise hurt physically or emotionally are not places we immediately return to, much less celebrate, though the stories that emerge from there often redefine who we are and how we move in the world. They are the places where, once we return, we rediscover what it means to be truly intimate and open with ourselves, with another and with life. The body is restructured — and we are redefined — by such experiences, as much as by any physical therapy received."

Osorio shares individual stories of "participants of a workshop in which they follow a guided visualization and meditation, and each person draws or paints what they feel when they re-enter those places in their own body. With the body as canvas, the drawings are then repainted on the original scar or area of change, bringing the imagery and colors of each person’s experience to the surface, making the vibrant energy of their individual story visible. Trauma sometimes washes out the color in life. Exploring the trauma allows, as Moore wrote, the soul to pour forth so that life is re-experienced. These are the ways people have been transformed."

Moore addresses cancer survivors about soul

Thomas Moore opens the the fifth annual Texas Breast Health Summit in Houston on Thursday 29 October. Jody Schoger blogs about the event and Moore’s message to the group of survivors, volunteers and caregivers at Jody’s Livestrong Challenge. According to Schoger, Moore "said that there is something about illness that gives a person's soul, or humanity, a chance to appear. "When we are sick," he said, "something of us is revealed. We can then view our illness as an opportunity, or a rite of passage."

Aboriginal healing restores natural balance

In Melbourne’s The Age, Andrew Stephens writes about a group of dancers and musicians, from Arnhem Land, visiting Victoria’s sites of the devastating bushfires in "Spirit songs of healing".

"Healing can seem largely mysterious. In a world where so much is deeply traumatic ― where wealth and poverty are in extreme, where fragile ecologies, economies and weather systems are collapsing, where faiths bicker, where our psyches and spirits are besieged ― the energy, respect and care required for healing and renewal might seem all too scarce and difficult.
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Contemporary philosopher Thomas Moore writes in Care of the Soul(1992) that caring for ourselves ― not just for our physical bodies ― does not mean curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy. Instead, he writes, we need to attend to soul with "an application of poetics to everyday life". That sounds abstract, but perhaps it is about sitting with the emotions and evolving in some enigmatic way ― something the arts, beauty and sharing with other people might help us to do in addition to professional help.
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Those who lived through the bushfires might naturally have incredible rage towards the brutal Australian landscape ― towards trees and fire and smoke and wind, towards the terrible confluence of circumstances that burnt so much life away. The indigenous approach to healing, in which everything is seen in relationship, perhaps has much to offer in its generous way. Land, people, spirituality: for our indigenous peoples, these cannot be treated in isolation.

It is a holism expressed beautifully by Gregory Phillips, a Waanyi and Jaru man from north-west Queensland who works in Melbourne as a medical anthropologist and who has long been involved with healing in Aboriginal education, land councils, youth and health sectors by developing community recovery programs. Healing of an individual, a family, community; or healing at a political level, or healing of country: they are all connected, he says. People, land, waterways, animals: they are in relationship together.

"Mainstream Western healing is concerned with the physical and the mental," says Phillips. "It doesn't understand or deal very well with the spiritual or emotional part of health. Aboriginal healing is essentially about restoring balance. It's all about relationships - about healing the individual, but also their relationships in the world. The thing is, in the Aboriginal world we are all connected, everything is connected.

"For us to survive, we have to look after our country. The land needs its people. For us, it's all about looking after those dreaming places we come from."