This is a haunting question. Therapists ask that many times of people out of a need to find a way to apply their fix-it program. If you say, "I want to improve my social skills," they may reply, "Well, what kind of problems are you having now?" Or a more skilled response might be, "Sounds like you are not quite satisfied about what is going on in your life." If you answer, "No, my relationships are excellent and fulfilling," and they believe you, many may feel stuck. If you say, "My relationships are so beautiful that I want to be able to deepen and improve them more," they often have no program for you. I once directed a treatment group to discuss all the delightful aspects of their relationships with each other. The participants could not do this for more than a few minutes. People seem too often to want to worry and evoke pain over their disorders and deficits, which that group did for hours. Therapy, philosophy, science and art overlap. But we who pursue these ways of healing are too often rich in words and poor in demonstrating what we mean.

         Much of what I am looking for in healing I already have, but these things need to be approached "as if for the first time" lest their constant presence fails to tease my attention. Here is what I want to continue experiencing....

~ To sit at the end of a long jetty at high tide and gaze at the horizon at dawn.

~ To prowl through forested mountains and watch the dusk shadows grow longer while listening to distant whitewater.

~ To throw stones from a 500 foot cliff and not hear them hit for many seconds.

~ To spend time sitting still, and then sprinting in rhythm with my breathing, feeling my aliveness along with the presence of death, the giver of life, feeling the wind whisper in my ears, the reflection of the clouds in the lake caressing my eyes.

~ To release anxiety, neutralize fear and transform it into laughter and feel its pleasant convulsions in my abdomen.

~ To stop holding onto myself, realizing in my soul that life and death are unified.

~ To enjoy a female friend and companion who will, alternatively, lose herself in me and push herself away for a solitary walk, agree with me and also object to me, love me with all her heart, yet love God more than me; admire me then show me things she can do better than me; squirm with bliss in my arms and also rest peacefully next to me.

~ For our children to know and love our parents and to hear stories about their grandparents; for our children to experience the connectedness of all sentient things, who will think of apple trees when they spoon the apple sauce from the jar, who will see the sunlight in the rings of an old stump, who will hear rain in the crackle of wood burning in a campfire; and who will love the Creator more than me or even themselves, delightingly losing themselves in the pervasiveness of the Spirit and laughing at their finds in the divine game of hide and seek.

~ To hear Gregorian chanting in a candle lit sanctuary and the liquid thunder of a pipe organ in the balcony.

~ To dance Havah Nagilah with fifty people around a giant bonfire; to listen to the echo my flute in the quiet cedar forest.

~ To write and talk with interested people, in lecture halls or small classrooms; to tease them with questions and play with their answers to open hearts to new ways of perceiving; to listen to people giving me information and wisdom I have not yet realized.

~ To burn incense or cedar late into the night; to sleep beneath towering trees and wake before dawn and watch growing sunlight refract through the dew drops on leaves and hear the birds waking.

~ To eat cheese and pieces of melon with sharpened sticks in the company of friends, talking into the night, playing whimsically with ideas while listening to the rain pound the windows.

~ To dance horizontally on a 200 foot cliff from a rope; and play in a huge kitchen experimenting with cooking a new dish.

~ To relieve pain and suffering, to inspire healing with my words.

~ To share my son's journal of his spiritual journey and for us to think aloud about our paths unfolding in this life.

~ For my foot steps on the earth to be humble prayers, and my actions to be pointers of the Way; to experience the reality that the same eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.

John S. Hilkevich, Ph.D.
www.prayergear.com
Email: Counserv@aol.com