Thank you, Ryan, for that lovely introduction.

Thank you Board of Trustees of the Marian Chace Foundation:

Jane. Sharon. Ann. Susan. Lynn.

Thank you ancestors of this land, for the love you breathed and danced into this earth before it was stolen from you.

I’d love to invite us all to acknowledge our ancestors. All of them, or one. Someone who perhaps inhabits a cherished place in your heart.

Take a moment to appreciate this ancestor, who guided you here. Gratitude is a voice of the heart.

In this spirit, I invite you all to place a hand where you sense your heartbeat. Once upon a time, when you were in your watery, pre life-on-land existence, the tissue that became your heart began as one courageously vulnerable little cell. The next cell to come along coupled with that first courageous cell, and your heartbeat began. As each couplet joined and your heart formed, you began the unique rhythm of you and sometimes, your rhythm entrained with your Mother’s, echoing a lineage of maternal heartbeats, each one with roots in the body of the mother who bore them.

My Mothers name was Mary Jean Jakubowski Gray. She was the second person I told when I was first invited to do this talk, and she promised to be there, as it was in Chicago, the place where she birthed me.

She is here. And her wisdom, shared in her final days, influenced todays talk. One of the Heartlines, the question of how do we know what we think we know, was seeded in one of our last conversations. A few days before she died, I complained to her that after 60 years, I didn’t know how I’d be in the world without her voice, words, and our daily conversations. Even the hard ones. Her response was:

People will tell you that they hope the memories comfort you. They don’t. It’s really hard at first. The painful memories are not comforting. As time goes on, it hurts less. And the memories go deeper; they are not thoughts, they live inside you.

Eventually—someday—the people you’ve loved and lost become part of you. They are in you. That's where I will always be—part of who you are. And you’ll know I am there.

I am choosing to speak from my heart today, to speak from my community of ancestors, my lineage of blood and spirit. If I have any wisdom to share, it's in this lineage, which includes my clients and many teachers—teachers of sacred dance and ceremony, of Dance/Movement Therapy, of Polyvagal Theory, of environmental science, of critical thinking, of medicine and Spirit. These are the heartlines this talk refers to: Emergent themes, ideas, processes and wisdom. And, my ancestors, teachers and clients’ voices, and what they—especially clients—have taught me about how to do this work.

These are my teachers and mentors: Art Hogenboom. John Murphy. Whitefeather. Treebeard. Micah Jean Massey. Ryan Kennedy. Christine Caldwell. Zoe Avestrieh. ManShoun. Ingrid Llera. Emilie Conrad, Anngwynn St Just. Steve Porges. Cosmo the Magnificent. Tony Lee. The Tongan tribe of humpback whales. Maxi the Dingo. Sylvia Nulpinditj. Clinton Gakymanu. Nillias Somby. Anja Somby. Dugan Coburn. Selena Coburn. Mary Jean Jakubowski Gray. Charles Franklin Gray. Karl Ferguson. These teachers move in the spiraling rhythm, shape and movement of my heart. It is important to say our teachers and elders names aloud, especially when they are gone.

I offer this talk as an inquiry into the collective or communal spirit of our work as Dance/Movement Therapists (“DMTs”). What does it mean to be a DMT working with a multi-cultural, multi-spiritual, multi-contextual community in the world we are living in today? The climate crises; racial, social, economic and justice inequity; violence; political posturing; threats to our rights & losses we are sitting with as a global community.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

I wish to uplift my clients’ voices as I have heard them through 25 years of deep listening, accompaniment, and witnessing. Theirs are the voices who have been intentionally silenced.

My clients are survivors of egregious human rights violations, historical trauma and long-term oppression: Torture. Genocide. War. Human trafficking. Religious, racial and political persecution. There are many contexts for our work together: Treatment and resettlement programs. University-based research programs. Reservations in the Southwest and First Nations communities in Australia. Active war zones, natural disasters, in clinics and on the streets where children live amongst garbage that has not been collected for months, or where rubble, or armed militia, or landmines, block safe passage. I’ve worked with my clients at many professional and humanitarian crossroads and I’ve helped establish two torture treatments, and one refugee mental health program in The United States and in Haiti, my spiritual home.

My clients' stories, fears, anxieties, sadness’s, hopes, dreams, passions, and love inform how I learn, ongoing, to be a DMT. The dark corridors of terror we navigate together have yielded many lessons I am still beginning to learn. I am choosing not to use slides or academic references. I am choosing to lift up my clients’ voices, and the emergent discoveries of our work and play together. Emergence is a Heartline, because this work is an ever unfolding and unknown landscape of raw discovery and unexpected moments; of shared joys and accomplishments, of nightmares and violence—all the wild terrain of the human heart, which I think of as our most noble map.

The work I share would not exist without my clients’ courage and vulnerability. I’ve called this work by a few names that reflect my learning:Restorative Movement Psychotherapy, because restoration is more realistic than recovery. Trauma is life changing. PolyVagal-Informed Dance/Movement Therapy reflects a theory that grounds this work in the current dominant paradigm of science, and it brings deep humanity and empowerment to my work with clients. Everyone has a vagus nerve, an ancestral and nomadic nerve that “travels” us through the experiences of our lives and reflects our human and more-than-human lineage. The vagus nerve, in the words of colleague Dr Nikki Elliot, represents equanimity (personal communication, October 14, 2022). This equanimity does not minimize the effects of long-term oppression and injustice on our pre- and developing nervous systems. It offers us the eternal possibility of emergent change. That is a living dance.

The current status of science as a dominant paradigm to explain what we know is a very helpful one in the current sociopolitical current that tries to tell us what we are allowed – or not – to know. However, it’s not the only way of knowing, and I’ll return to that.

This work I share is the work of my clients and me; it’s not mine. This is not the first time I have leaned into the wisdom of this shared work. When my Father began his decline towards death, which took almost 6 years, and when I received the call that my Mother was dying and to come as quickly as possible, I sought wisdom from our work. My clients have taught me much about enduring loss and fear, and sourcing resilience.

Likewise, on March 11, 2020, I sat in my refugee clinic in Albuquerque, contemplating the long hardship and suffering I sensed our world was in for. Three nights of dreams about Coronavirus prepared me, and I knew two things: To stock up on birdseed so that I could continue to care for the birds in my office courtyard, who bring so much joy to my clients, and that I should revisit my clients strength and resilience through what I have learned from them to support my community to prepare for what was coming. This meant-to-be one-off class called Ground in the Swirl happened on March 18. Then, it went “viral”, becoming a series over many months. The content and processes of these classes shared what my clients taught me and today, I am covering some of these as emergent themes: Slowing Down. Timing and Embodied Justice. Microempowerments. Micromobilizations. Reciprocal Alliance. Belonging. The Privilege of Safety. Interoception, the Noble Pathway and our Deep Wisdom Pool. Compassion. All the things I now teach as an offering to the forward impulse of evolution so that my clients’ vulnerability, courage and wisdom can seed more vulnerability, courage and wisdom.

Marian Chace Foundation Lecture Title: Heartlines: Gathering Wisdom from Many Streams

Marian Chace Foundation Lecturer: Amber Elizabeth Lynn Gray, PhD, MA, MPH, BC-DMT, NCC, LPC, LPCC

Emergent Theme #1: Slowing Down

My very first client, who survived torture, initiated this lesson. I wrote about her in my 2001 article in the American Journal of Dance Therapy: The Body Remembers (Gray, 2001). In our first session, she described an unbearable pain that was both physical (in her left shoulder) and psychological (“in her heart”). Her shoulders reflected these pains in its immobility. By the end of the first session she had moved a frozen shoulder with a simple backwards-rolling motion. It seemed so small to me at the time.

It was too much. She flooded, had an asthma attack, and stayed home for 2 weeks.

We live in a very speedy society. DMT lives in the broader context of mental health, which means that it, like all psychotherapies, are rooted in western, medical, euro-centric frameworks, which might be helpful frameworks for those they are relevant for. If we work in agencies or with managed care or have to prove that our work is evidence based or medically necessary, our work with clients becomes limited and constricted. It requires a certain pace—a rhythm—that usually does not align with the rhythm of healing. Healing takes time. In a more recent chapter in Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory (2018), I share the work I did with a woman who I call Rachel in my ADTA talk. Her history is still one of the most confronting and disturbing stories of violation and abuse I have ever heard.

Emergent Theme #2: Timing & Embodied Justice, Micromobilizations & Micromovements. Reciprocal Alliance

Rachel lived with unbearable physical and psychological pain. I usually don't wish to begin with pain; I prefer to begin with something more resourced. From her collapsed, shut down, immobilized in terror state, pain was the only thing she could connect to. So, we began there.

For the first 4 weeks, this is what we did: Of the two pains in her body, the pain in her leg was the most tolerable. The only relief she knew was to rest it on a pillow. So we used a physioball to rest her leg on, so she could experience yield. Over the next four weeks, she began to move her leg the tiniest little bit. I now call this way of working with very tiny movements and micromovements “Micromobilizations”. They are an effective and relatively safe way for clients who are immobilized in terror to begin to move. They offer just enough movement to shift out of shut down, and begin the climb to sympathetic adrenal mediated movement. We negotiate the fear as we climb. These are tiny Micromovements that signal renewed engagement. Over the 4 weeks we focused on only this, I played subtly with moving myself in space and in relationship to her—closer towards her and farther away. Making eye contact for a little longer, softening my gaze. She began to shift. I sat more upright and breathed audibly, so she could sense my nervous system, my spirit, breathing with her. After 4 weeks, she still had pain but she could put more weight on her leg. She could meet my gaze for a few moments. She could sit up a little taller. And that was the beginning of a process that took 14 months and if you watch my ADTA talk on working with survivors of torture, you will see her dance to freedom that culminated our work together.

My work with Rachel was in many ways the birth of Reciprocal Alliance. I choose this term instead of therapeutic relationship because of the inherent power in the traditional client therapist relationship. Reciprocal Alliance speaks to client empowerment through the sharing of power in our client-therapist relationship. Because this relationship is situated in the context of mental or behavioral health, we naturally have a lot of power. I believe that each and every place we dismantle power contributes to broader liberation.

Rachel also taught me to slow down, to honor her rhythm, and as much as I wished for her to restore her full expressive capacities as quickly as possible, I honored her timing. The restoration of true timing is embodied justice.

The power of a single breath that reaches a little farther into our tissue. The power of a tiny movement that tells us we are still alive. The power of easing into the weight of who I am, and finding Place, so I might reconnect to Belonging.

Emergent Theme # 3: Belonging

There were two core experiences, in 2007 that made Belonging central to my work with refugees. We conducted focus groups with our refugee community in New Mexico. The purpose of these groups was to help our refugee clinic understand what our refugee community believed was essential for healing and restoration. The primary themes of displacement and belonging emerged as core to this community’s experience. Through this process, I came to appreciate that a restored sense of Belonging, as much as possible, might be considered the most essential and hopeful “outcome” of our work.

In 2008, Captain John Tuskan, then Director of Refugee Mental Health for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and The Office of Refugee Resettlement, asked me to create a model for Refugee Mental Health. He was concerned at the almost singularly cognitive behavioral (“CBT”) direction the emphasis on evidence based was taking mental health. He was also concerned about the impact of this narrow definition on access to relevant care for refugees. Here is a slide that depicts the framework I offered him, based on the CBT triangle, and based on my collaborative approach to working with my clients.

This image represents a revision alteration to the traditional CBT triangle in service of refugee mental health, and more broadly, applied trauma-informed and survivor-centered DMT in a multicultural setting (which is Restorative Movement Psychotherapy). At the top is Belonging, and Meaning-making, where thoughts sit in the CBT triangle. This invites a much more global and relevant emphasis on what matters to refugees and by extension any community experiencing a sense of displacement. Put simply: a restored sense of Belonging is our primary desired clinical “outcome”. At the other corners are culture, and history (trauma). The inclusion of culture is essential in this work. I use this term broadly, inclusive of all aspects of a person, families, communities’ life that they consider to be part of their culture. There is much to say about culture, and for time and space sake, what is perhaps most important is that we learn and remain open to our clients cultural perspectives, ideas, beliefs, contexts etc. so that our work with them is relevant. Inviting our clients to teach us about culture—without burdening them—invites their expertise and promotes Reciprocal Alliance. We also learn on our own, from reliable sources, so that we don’t burden them and can show up with the wisdom and knowledge they expect and deserve from us, and we offer it in a reciprocal manner.

History with trauma in parentheses is a bit more complex. In service of brevity and clarity, I offer this: Our client histories are far bigger than the “client history” data we may need to collect on our assessment forms, and represents what we continue to learn in our ongoing Reciprocal Alliance. Our clients' histories are part of their chosen way of understanding and expressing a sense of self. It may include ancestors and nature and all other living beings and more. I adopted this from child CBT expert and colleague Marylene Cloitre, who spoke about this in a conference we co-presented at. Her perspective was that a primary accomplishment of our work is to help clients put the trauma where it belongs in their life-line, i.e.in the past. This was a helpful idea for me, and; it was based on a Western-centric linear time-line. What I offer here is the understanding, acceptance and acknowledgement that client histories may extend generations, and may do this not just linearly but in Kyros, or spiral or Dreamtime. The “usual” linear timeline can present the traumas that may have occurred only once or may have occurred across lifetimes as chronological events in a person’s lived life (i.e. time on earth) only. They are chronological events and they are imprints and ripples that reach across time and space touching and integrating with all aspects of a person's sense of self, including relatives, place, ancestry and communities. These traumas are woven, like a braid, with their history, past and future. Where there is intergenerational trauma there is also intergenerational resilience and the simultaneous and sequential weaving of trauma and history becomes a braid that reflects resilience.

The sides of the triangle are the pathways that connect these three points: Foundational, and therefore at the base is the human body in all the ways our clients know and define and express their bodies from the tiniest sensori-motoric Micromovement to the biggest expression of human movement: migration, and life passages such as birth and death. At the sides are what I call the feeling and thinking continuums: Our deepest blueprint of affect. Our emotions, felt for hours or days or months, along life’s way. And the more fleeting surface level experience of feelings, that connect us to our roaming and moving and forming thoughts. Cognition and all its emergent processes of beliefs and ideas are the pathways on the other side. In the center, or heart of the triangle is Dignity. This adaption of the CBT triangle offers a more holistic and dynamic image of this work, and my refugee clients and collaborators who reviewed this were grateful to be seen in a much bigger whole than they had previously been seen.

A sense of safety, or “safe as can be”, is necessary to sense our Belonging.

Emergent Themes #4: The Privilege of Safety

Safety is a Birthright for all, and a privilege for few.

From the moment I began this work in 1998, I was curious how DMT might be more universally accessible and relevant for my clients. That curiosity may have taken safety for granted. I witnessed first hand in Kosovo, in 2000, humanitarian responders who were guiding people in an active war zone into “safe spaces.” The recoil was fierce. More recently I was in Hungary, working with Ukrainian women fleeing gender-based violence there and one woman, in fast response to a trainers slide titled “How to be safe”, said: “Safety? SAFETY? Are you kidding me? How am I—we—supposed to feel any safety when we have lost our homes, our land, our husbands: Everything we know? We do not even know who we are anymore.”

The words safety and trust are often used in psychotherapeutic/psychosocial language as a given, particularly in many somatic trauma approaches. Assumptions are disrespectful. I borrow Dr Anngwyn St Just’s (professor at Systemic Trauma University) term relative safety (personal communication, 1999):

May we be as safe as possible in an uncertain world

I think of this in two ways, as a both/and: It's disrespectful to assume safety for my clients, because I am bringing them into a western context, which may not be theirs. It is equally disrespectful to assume no safety. I need to recognize their socio-cultural reference points for safety—family, community, meal sharing, worship—and that they may or may not have access to them. Being safe as can be is cultivated slowly through respect and reciprocity. The power dynamic that exists in our relationship with clients can actually be reassuring to some, in some contexts, and may be scary for others who have experienced human rights abuse, oppression and subjugation at the hands of another.

The complexity of safety was illustrated in my first client, whose I pushed towards a shoulder roll too fast, even though it was not a big movement.

I also think of 3 clients who taught me about the potentially harmful assumption of safety, and the importance of relative safety with our clients.

The first client I’ll share lost every single-family member in the diamond wars on the Continent now known as Africa and came to the U.S. alone. We worked hard for 8 months to process his deep grief and fear of an uncertain and lonely future. After this intensive work, he felt ready to find a job. It was very important to him to support himself financially. He was persistent in his job search, but did not get hired for many months. He realized it was his accent. His native language was very lyrical, and he could sense it was difficult for some people to understand him. We turned our sessions into mock job interviews, and he landed a job with the U.S. postal service. He loved his job. His job loved him. This man, who had lost his entire family, would often say to me “It makes me so happy to be delivering news from loved ones to their family members here.”

He was quickly promoted and on a first day in a new and more “upscale” and reportedly (per his manager) “safe” neighborhood, he was unsure of an address, and asked someone walking the street for help. The person told him to get out of the way and called him a terrible derogatory and racist term. He returned to therapy, broken and crushed. He had been moved from a multi-ethnic to very white neighborhood, told it was a promotion to a “better” and “safer” neighborhood. He kept saying, “I feel as betrayed as I did back home”.

Another client I will share arrived here terrified of leaving her home. She came from a country with extreme Sharia laws for women, where she was a women’s rights activist. Our work for many months began with designating a “safe as can be” place in her home, where she always centered herself before she left for any reason. As one aspect of our ongoing work, we made a map of her neighborhood and after each session, we co-determined how far she would venture out the next time. We practiced these journeys together and created “postures of preparation”. We began with a goal of her getting down one flight of stairs and our work completed about eight months later when she could drive herself and a new friend to NIA classes. Yes, it took 8 months for her to be relatively safe enough to drive a few miles. This is why we cannot assume the “safety” we might co-cultivate with our clients is a full-time, constant experience. I often suggest to my students that the most important aspect of our work is what happens between sessions.

Here is another client vignette from work with a person who helped me understand the role of clients’ socio-cultural processes in their relative safety and empowerment.

One of my clients, also a victim of the blood diamond wars, had been used by soldiers in a rape camp where she was held for almost a year.

After several months of our work, which included story telling by co-creating dances we did together to tell stories from her happy childhood memories to the unspeakable things she wanted me to know but could not say, she realized she needed a cleansing ritual to clear herself. I always search for someone from clients’ communities with these capacities, but there was not a medicine person from her religion in our community. She decided I needed to facilitate the ritual. I attempted to explain why that might not be an appropriate role for me. When she insisted, I offered to continue to search for someone. After the session, the interpreter pulled me aside and said “You are the only person she has shared her secrets with. If she requests you to do this, please do. You are the person she is beginning to trust in this city.“ We spent the next several sessions with her, and the interpreter who was from the same tribe and familiar with the ritual, teaching a willing colleague and myself what we needed to do. We co-created, with our interpreter, the cleansing ritual. This socio-cultural process was far more meaningful to her sense of relative safety than anything else I might have offered. My willingness to engage in her culture fostered the Reciprocal Alliance that is core to bringing a human rights and social justice lens and center to our work.

I’d like to share a simple practice that promotes a sense of relative safety. It's called “Moving to Comfort”.

Take a moment to notice how physically comfortable you are.

Pause.

Now take a moment to practice increasing your physical comfort. What in this moment will help you feel more physically comfortable? Notice the internal cues, i.e. how perhaps uncrossing a leg or shifting your weight might reduce muscle tension or ease pain. Notice the external cues i.e. do you need to move to another area of the room, change what you are sitting on, etc.

Pause.

Take another moment to change anything else that will increase your physical comfort.

This practice shifts neuroception, and is what I call a Microempowerment. Dr Porges coined the term neuroception to describe the ongoing gift of our Autonomic Nervous Systems’ appraisal of the space we are in. It is subcortical, below consciousness, and is a root for our interoception.

Emergent Themes #5: Interception: The Deep Wisdom Pool & Noble Pathway

Interoception has become quite a popular term. I often hear it spoken of as a fairly recent discovery in medical and psychotherapeutic contexts where it’s hailed as a new discovery or layer to this work. I want to acknowledge Emilie Conrad, whose Continuum work long emphasized interoception as our own inner wisdom and voice to speak truth to power, and Christine Caldwell, who 30 years ago taught that if we only privilege the big movements that DMT often does, we miss the smaller marginalized voices that have been suppressed, repressed and oppressed.

I recently heard a medical doctor talk about the burgeoning awareness and research on interoception, as if it were a new concept. It “landed” in my body in an unsettled way at that moment. Yes, it may be a new idea to some professions and professionals, and it's good that it’s being recognized and integrated in more professional spaces. But it’s not new. It’s very, very old.

The presenter then continued to trace the origins of our awareness and understanding of interoception to Darwin, spending considerable time celebrating his discovery. My body recoiled.

Interoception did not begin with Darwin, whose work on social Darwinism influenced his Cousin Galton’s theories of eugenics.

Here’s a question: When will we stop propping up perpetrators of injustice and racism? As long as we continue to uphold these histories that seeded and seed the institutionalized racism and oppression that this society is built on, in all our practices and ways of being with, measuring, and evaluating clients, we participate in the oppression. This is one of many incomplete, inaccurate accountings of history.

Interoception is the Indigenous way of knowing that we have known for a very long time. We don’t need a name for this knowing. And, we have many names to acknowledge it.

One way I think of this way of knowing as our Deep Wisdom Pool, and the base of our Noble Pathway.

Let's consider the vagus nerve and the spine, which are both pathways of interoception in the mammalian body. These are bi-directional, primarily bottom-up pathways. The Heart is mid- way on these paths. In the simplest language, because this is a complex process, we know that 80% of the information that travels the vagal pathway moves bottom up and only 20% is top down. The heart's location in this “Noble Pathway” that 80% of the time begins in our dorsal vagal, visceral belly brain and Deep Wisdom Pool, seems significant and perhaps even auspicious.

Heart math research has shown that the heart, like our belly, is worthy of the name brain. It is not the involuntary muscle pump it was once described as. It is 60% neural tissue. It communicates its mechanical and chemical state to the brain via the vagus nerve and spinal cord. Its field is 60 times the amplitude of that of the brain (2015, p. 36). What this means is we feel another and connect to one another through our hearts more potently and sooner than our brains connect.

If you wish to join me, let's place our hands on our heart space again. Imagine you can send your energy down to the right sinoatrial node of the heart. This is a potent place. This is where the ventral vagal circuit innervates the heart; where our social engagement system regulates and “protects” our state of calm, grounded connection and our social and relational capacity. Here, a place I call “the kiss of the beloved”, we feed our life-affirming connection to self and other. With your hand there consider this emergent question:

Maybe the heart, which is a sensory organ, midway on interoceptive and evolutionary pathways, is fundamental to our knowing? Maybe it is also fundamental to Emergence?

The vagal pathway from heart to brain is highly myelinated, unlike the pathway from belly to heart. The latter might be called “dial up” internet and the former, 5G. The heart also connects us to Spirit. The Dorsal Vagal Circuit, our viscera, our belly brain, this area I refer to as our Deep Wisdom Pool, are doorways to Spirit. I am glad science is finally catching up to ancient wisdom, and to the teachings of the mysteries. For my many clients whose culture is rooted in older and often wiser ways of knowing, it's essential that I- We—honor these ways of knowing.

Here is another question, one that the last client vignette I shared inspires: What does this mean in the current and essential discourse on cultural appropriation and appreciation?

Sa nou pa we is a Kreyol phrase that means “That which we don’t see”. As with all Haitian metaphors, proverbs and sayings, there is an implicit and an explicit meaning. There is mystery, which is another Heartline. The deeper meaning of this is what my Spiritual Mother Manshoun taught me over and over again, in my time with her: The ever present unseen. That which we have always known in our bodies is the same thing we know in our Spirits.

I have often asked myself what it means to carry this transmission of knowledge, from a culture that is not my own. In this time of reckoning about all the ways Indigenous and oppressed communities have been appropriated, it's essential to ask: What does it mean to be invited into and to know these ancient and sacred teachings? I go back to my question about our role as DMTs in a vastly growing field and in a world that is begging for decolonization and a restoration of all that was stolen. It is not a badge or a certificate to hang on the wall. It is not a source of income. It is a responsibility. A responsibility to continue the deep listening, and the learning, and to offer reciprocity through a careful tending of the wisdom. The ongoing practice of this wisdom must always benefit its source. This requires generosity, which I have come to think of as being more about what we receive than what we give. When we are willing to open up and receive, our hearts open. This is a basis of true reciprocity. When we see from our open and compassionate hearts, othering and objectifying cannot occur.

In our work, we have access to ancient and rich traditions of dance that have always healed and restored. In terms of the oft stated “Dance is universal” phrase, I think of DMT as one stream or current in an ocean of all the ways dance is healing. And I think of all of us as belonging to the dance that is all of us—the cosmos, the ever-moving universe of energy, time, and space. We stay in our stream, perhaps move into others when we are invited to, and celebrate the diversity of these streams while recognizing the right to Belonging that is all of us.

Emergent Theme #6: Compassion & Letting Go as Emergent Evolution

I will begin these musings on Compassion at the heart of our work with a dream I had over 30 years ago. In this dream, my Father and I were stuck in a stadium bleacher overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It seemed like the Los Angeles area. We were going up and down the bleachers trying to find a way out. As we did this, my Dad began to weaken, and physically shrink. I suddenly realized that he was dying, and would die if we didn’t get out. At one point, feeling afraid of his impending death, I turned and looked at the ocean. Four whales appeared, spiral dancing like synchronized swimmers, their tails above water in complete unison. I woke up, and instantly knew the whales were signaling Compassion. I knew my Dad would die, and I knew it would be ok.

Whales have continued to be my teachers, and I will return to this shortly.

I’d like to situate Compassion in relation to our work, with an idea I call the “Trilogy of Human Response”. In this trilogy, Compassion is an emergent human response that evolves from the more primary responses of sympathy and empathy. This trilogy is an emergent spiral and the symbol I have used for years to illustrate it is a nautilus shell. A nautilus shell is born with 4 chambers, and no matter how big it grows and how many chambers there are, it will always source its center for nourishment. What a beautiful and powerful image of emergence from our more-than-human world.

Dr Henry Tobey introduced me to the idea that these three often confused emotions (sympathy, empathy, Compassion) are quite different. In later years, a YouTube video by Jeremy Rifkin celebrating the discovery of mirror neurons as central to empathy fueled my inquiry (Rifkin, 2010). Rifkin posits that because humans are now known to be soft wired for empathy, we can create a more civilized and kind global community. I question this.

A few years ago I was beginning an initial intake with a client whose story to this day remains one of the most horrific I have ever heard. About ten minutes in, he stopped me by pounding his fist on a table and shouting: “DON’T MOCK ME!”.

I paused, confused as to what I might be doing that felt like mocking to him. Standing here now, I can recall my eager forward leaning posture, my intentional attempts (read: overreaching) to create an equal connection, an empathic connection. I can now reflect on the arrogance and naiveté of this. I have never been humiliated, life-threatened or tortured like him or any of my clients.

I continued and within minutes he pounded his fist even harder and shouted DON’T MOCK ME! more intensely. I paused. I breathed. I sat back and took a moment to meet his gaze softly. I asked what I was doing, so that I might stop something that was clearly painful for him.

He responded: “You’re looking right through me. You see me, like they did. This is how they hurt me. This is how they gave me so much pain.”

In the Trilogy of Human Response, empathy is part of the emergent response spiral that begins with the more primary emotion of sympathy. Sympathy means we feel for, and this is not appropriate for human rights work because it can disempower. It has its place in other contexts. Empathy is core to how we connect, and as a more highly evolved response, is essential to our human-to-human connection. However empathy can be exploited in service of cruelty, and this is what this client and many others taught me. Sadistic abusers use their empathy to increase another’s suffering. A few years later, as I was contemplating Compassion as a more highly evolved response I asked meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg if she agreed that when true Compassion is present, cruelty is not possible. She did, and shared that from a Buddhist perspective Compassion eliminates cruelty. Roshi Joan Halifax describes Compassion as empathy plus the will to act. So perhaps we can consider this possibility: Compassion is an evolutionary trajectory we are on, in service of a global reciprocity, a truly more connected humanity. Like a nautilus, every expanding spiral is always connected to the center.

In fact, research by German researcher Tania Singer demonstrates that empathy and Compassion are indeed very different states in terms of brain activity and I encourage you to check her work out (Singer, 2020).

Let's get back to the ocean and the heart. I have been privileged to spend a few weeks each summer with humpback whales in the South Pacific. Whales and dolphins, like us, evolved from water to land. When land dwellers, they were hippo-wolf-like creatures who eventually returned to the ocean. What called them back to the deep blue depths? Any articles I’ve read in my inquiries don’t offer a definite reason; a few suggest that possibly food sources drove them back. I question this as a singular reason; at the time they returned to the ocean, there was likely ample food rich-land to roam. So I return to the questions of knowing: What did, or do, they know? Consider the adaptations they had to make to live in the ocean, who I call “Big Blue Love”. If you’ve ever read Blue Mind (2014), we know that humans do respond to the ocean, either in it, on it or next to it, with a variety of calm, peaceful, content responses. It's healing because it's home.

When these Cetaceans returned to their watery existence, they had lost their gills. Which means they had to free dive. Free diving is not holding breath; it’s dancing with breath so that we can remain underwater and in relationship with our evolutionary ancestors for more time than we could by breathing our usual way. It's a long, slow exhale, which we know from Polyvagal Theory promotes vagal tone and therefore social engagement, or what I refer to as enhanced relational and social capacities. As a novice free diver, I have experienced the state-shifts that occur in this dance, and this has opened another Heartline of inquiry. What’s necessary physiologically to remain suspended in this ocean without gills, to dance the breath and remain underwater for 60 minutes at a time? I imagine one of the physiological adaptations the whales and dolphins made, who are often considered to be more intelligent than we humans, is to grow their hearts. Neuroplasticity focuses on the human capacity to grow our brains, which is a wonderful discovery. The human brain location and consideration as being on “top” and responsible for our most advanced intelligence can and does get us in trouble though. Privileging our “brain brain” and cognitive and analytical abilities as the most advanced aspect of our human intelligence negates the potency of the heart brain connection. I believe whales likely have a smaller heart brain size ratio than humans, and that the Compassion pathway between heart and brain is even more highly myelinated. Thus their intelligence, which I call heart-mind intelligence, is more Compassion-based. We know that Compassion is connected to the heart; research on women who practice self-compassion demonstrates increased heart health (Science Daily, 2021, December 16). There’s a lot of ancient wisdom in that science. The contemplative practices around the world have long posited that Compassion is an emergent process of an open heart. Dr Porges describes Compassion as a ventrally mediated state (2017, p. 199). Let’s consider this: Can our hearts plasticize, like our brains do? If yes, which seems plausible, what’s possible?

I refer back to my whale dream, as I recall my Father’s death in a COVID unit. He was infected by the Delta variant, and the rules were we had to wear full PPE to visit and could only remain for 5 minutes. I will never forget the compassionate nurse who tended my Father, who I now know was the emergent possibility of my dream. When I arrived, we stepped into his cold, drab room together, and she reminded me of those rules. And then she said:

Once I close that door, I don't care what you do. Feel free to remove your mask or goggles. He is no longer infectious. He is your father and he is dying. These are your last days with him. Stay as long as you want. Let me know if you need anything. Come as often as you want. He needs you.

Here was that dream of so many years ago, the dance, the whales who initiated me into a Heartline journey of the nature and depth of the compassionate heart. This begs the question: What’s possible? What if we paid attention to the wisdom that emanates from other species, our more-than-human evolutionary ancestors to whom we owe the gift of life in this human form, in this time and place, now?

There is one last client voice to raise up, a client who is one of my greatest Compassion teachers. Content warning: this vignette contains difficult material. Let's take a moment to connect with our hearts, and breathe. Grow your heart a little bit by feeling your heart expand on your inhales, and keep it expanded when you exhale. When we boldly imagine this, we create the possibility for it to really happen. That's what dreams are.

This client was a decorated sniper whose country was in a protracted civil war with a neighboring country. He was captured by that country’s military.

He was seeking asylum in the United States because he fled his country after he escaped his captors. They blindfolded him and tortured him by exploiting his sniper abilities. They drove him to villages in his country and forced him to snipe out entire villages of women and children, of his own people.

Just take a moment to notice how that lands in you and what your heart is sensing. It can be easier to judge than to witness such realities. A compassionate heart is a witnessing heart.

He shared, without emotion and with remorse, that he did this because there was always a gun to his head, and he would be killed if he didn’t do it. He had a beloved wife and two children harboring in another country, and he longed to see them again.

Breathe into your heart. Love of family, the longing to be with them. I think of my West African client shared earlier, who lost his entire family, and still loved delivering the mail because it might connect loved ones together.

Our work together was complex and I will highlight a few key things that continue to inform and inspire me. He was an intensely disciplined, intelligent man with a lot of armoring. He only wanted CBT. We started there, and he consistently resisted his body, emotions, and sensations. CBT did help him recognize and identify his remorse, and his fear of failure if he did not get asylum. He was afraid he would fail his family.

One day, he mentioned his proficiency in martial arts (judo) and in yoga. As a former yoga teacher, I hoped I had an “in.”

We began to do yoga to accompany our conversations, which focused on his asylum case, which I testified for, and his daily life in the U.S.. Asylum seekers don't have legal rights. This was his second attempt, and due to what I shared, he could not go home. He would be killed. He was also at risk where his family was hiding.

Other than what he shared about his torture, and bits and pieces about his current daily life, I only knew that he longed to go home. I knew he and his wife loved plants and shared a passion for gardening, and that his only friend in his bare apartment here was a plant. It reminded him of love, and home. I also learned that bowing was a gesture of profound respect to him, and he reserved his bows for only those who earned his confidence, trust and respect. For him, a bow was the posture of the most profound dignity. One more essential detail: Because of his tendency to talk at length and ruminate or “spin” in story, we had an agreement that I could use the “Shhhhh” gesture and sound to pause us. In the spirit of Reciprocal Alliance, he could do the same when he needed a pause or transition, which he became increasingly more comfortable with in our time together.

He had a fiery temper and it would flare up when I pushed to go beneath his cognitions. When we first tried yoga, which I hoped would be an easier pathway to his embodied experience, he bound off the chair and did a headstand with such intensity his feet put holes in my wall. This is where our work began.

I asked him if he was willing to try yoga “my way,” and he agreed. We began slowing his practice down, bringing breath in, feeling the” in between” of the Asanas, versus his tendency to just lunge into poses. As we did this as an accompaniment to our conversations about the challenges and frustrations of his life, his temper with me eased. He expressed a deeper sense of what he felt: Not just fear, but terror of going home or to where his family was. Not wanting to die.

His anger was deeply held, and I always sensed there was a pressure cooker under his skin. One day, he came in very agitated and mobilized, and boasted about having cut off a man’s ponytail at work. He pumped gas at a fairly rural gas station, and the man had tried to steal gas. He defended the gas station. As he described this, it was clear it had happened very quickly. He used derogatory terms to describe the man, who he said was Native American. I was stunned, and I remained quiet, squelching the judgment in my heart.

I asked the question he hated the most: As you tell me this story, what’s going on in your body? He became more agitated. He talked around it. Listening, I suddenly had one of those felt sense moments where it became clear that his bravado and his anger was self loathing. I could taste the hatred and shame that were deep within his very defended, tight, constricted self.

At the right felt sense moment I looked at him and said “I see what you’re doing. You want me to hate you as much as you hate yourself right now.”

Silence. Neither of us breathed for a moment. Then, I exhaled.

I continued: “It must have taken a lot of anger to do what you did to that man. Did it remind you of what you were forced to do back home?”

Silence. He became obviously physically uncomfortable. He also had tears in his eyes.

A few moments later I said: “No matter how hard you try I will never hate you. I have told you this before: I see your dignity. And no matter what you share, I will choose love. I will choose to believe in you, and I will choose love.”

As these words came out, I surprised myself. I instantly wondered if I said too much, opened up too much. It was as if the words were being spoken through me versus being something I considered thoughtfully.

He wanted to go, and left. He canceled the following week and I just knew I'd messed up. He didn't return my calls.

When he came back the following week, two weeks after that session, he was holding a plant. As he entered my office, he shushed me in our agreed upon pause gesture, and would not allow me to speak.

He placed the plant in the center of my office, and I tried to speak again. He shushed me and stood quietly for a moment. We held each other’s gaze. He looked me in the eyes, and said: Please do not speak. I am going home. I am going to meet my family and we will try to go home.

I tried to speak. He silenced me again. I tried to speak again, he shushed me more ardently. Then, he looked me right in my eyes, and bowed before he walked out. I stood in my office, stunned, and when I stepped out into the hallway, he was quickly gone. I went to a co- workers office and cried. I was sure he faced death.

In this work with survivors of torture and war, it’s not unusual for us to lose track of clients, with whom we’ve journeyed. Uncommon endings and lack of typical therapeutic closure processes is common. I imagine we all know the uncertain questioning that can occur with these endings, and that we all have wondered about the impact of our work beyond the days we spend with clients. It seems rare to know what happens many years after our relationships end.

For all of us who have contemplated the impact of our work and our witness, beyond the usual outcomes measures and program evaluations which are important and may not tell the whole human story of reciprocity and Belonging I fast forward to 8 years later.

I was at my computer responding to emails when an email came in from a name that seemed familiar to me. As I read the email, I recognize this client’s last name It was his son, and he wrote this:

Hi. My name is “John”, and I am “Joe’s” son. You helped my Father many years ago. He wants you to know he is alive and he is ok. We are back home, and he has a position in our government. He still has to be very cautious. This is the only email. I can send. He wants you to know he never forgot what you said to him. It still helps him. Thank you.

I wrote a brief response, which ended with “I know you cannot respond, and, I would love to know what I said to your Father. It was so long ago I am not sure what he is referring to.

A few days later, an email arrived that said only this:

I believe in myself and I know you believe in me, too.

I will always choose love.

This work is not easy and there is no map but our own compassionate heart. It’s about witnessing; not healing or fixing. Co- regulation is one of those terms that’s become popularized and I propose it means to bear witness to another’s deep experience. The willingness to bear witness to another’s suffering is perhaps one of the most courageous and compassionate acts of co-regulation, of being with. Perhaps powerful enough to globally co-regulate, or what I cheekily call “Glo-regulation.”. One of my supervisee’s clients once made this request of her: “When I ask for help, don’t tell me the steps. Show me the path. Walk with me.” I am grateful to my clients who allowed me to walk with them into those unlit places where the burden of fear and uncertainty are the environment; where shards of sensori-motoric, image based fragments haunt the landscapes we are walking: The landscape of embodied memory. Yes, we seed, water and light our resiliency all along the way, and we meet the unspeakable and the terrible knowledge of pain, loss, oppression, and injustice with the bravery that is our body, breath, and bones. Feet and hands. Sacrum. Sternum. Belly. Heart.

I invite you to place your hand on your heart again. Our hearts have a physical still point, deep in the center, where it does not beat. All of the heart's movement is in the layers closer to the surface. This center still-point has its own lymphatic system to remove fluids. It also has a shape that is physically visible under a high-powered microscope and the shape is an infinity sign.

With your hand on this place where the heart is etched with the symbol of eternity, I invite you to rest and pause your breath into this place. Imagine, for a moment, you can see the world from this place, while I end with a favorite excerpt from Ursula K. LeGuin’s book, Always Coming Home.

When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.

Thank you.