Spirit in Action
Body, Mind, Spirit (Moving) - The Oct 30-31 Conference at UW-Stout
The 13th Body, Mind, Spirit conference and preconference is a rich platter of inner and outer healing for the world. Bob Salt helped found the event and has his own powerful acedemic and spiritual resources to share. Selene Vega will be co-presenting at the preconference on "Inner Ethics: Examining Countertransference with Compassion" with Kylea Taylor, and shares from her rich and varied spiritual and psychological resources
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Oct 2009
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - This week for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with two people connected with the upcoming body mind spirit conference to be held at the university Wisconsin Stout on Friday and Saturday, October 30th and 31st. Before I tell you about my guests, I want to remind you about another opportunity for Saturday, October 31st. And that's the ways of peace conference being held in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. This is the first of a series of conferences on non-violence, this time looking at non-violence in the Christian tradition. For only $10 and with the raft of wonderful speakers and presenters, it's priced so that everyone can attend. Walter Wink may be widely known, but there's also Kathy Kelly, Rita Nakashima Brock, William T. Kavanagh, Gerald Schlevach, and Christine Smith. You can get the info on the friends for a non-violent world website, fnvw.org, or simply follow the link from my northernspiritradio.org. Now, as I said, there is a second wonderful opportunity that weekend and it's at UW Stout, the Body Mind Spirit Conference. We'll talk later with Celine Vega, who will be co-presenting on the Friday Pre-conference with Kylia Taylor on Inner Ethics, examining counter-transference with compassion. But we'll start out this edition of Spirit in Action, talking with one of the organizational and spiritual forces behind the conference, Bob Salt. He's a professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department at UW Stout and an Interfaith Minister in Menominee's Interfaith Church. Bob, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - It's my pleasure. - This is the 13th annual Body Mind and Spirit Conference coming up. How much have you been involved in planning this over the past 13 years? - I started with Tom Franklin back in 1997. Tom was the chair of the psychology department at Stout. And he and I were talking about a field of study called Transpersonal Psychology. And that led us to thinking, well, maybe we should do something for the students and for the public. Eventually, that led us to create the very first annual Body Mind and Spirit Conference. And Tom and I worked together on that conference for the next 11 years. And for the past two years, Kevin Dole has been my co-chair. But I've been involved in the project right from the very beginning. - What is your post at Stout that allows you to do this kind of work? 'Cause I think this is kind of cutting edge for a public university. - Well, when I began, I was a regular old faculty member at the university. I was a tenured full professor. I was curious myself about whether or not the university would support something like this. I had a conversation with another colleague, other than Tom, that I was mentioning earlier. And she was suggesting that our dean of the college at the time, Professor Ed Bigger's staff, was in favor of doing something like that, that he would be supportive. And so I went to him and said, we're thinking of doing something like a class or a workshop or something like that. And would that be okay? And he said, yeah, I think lots of students here would love to have that sort of conversation. So the head of what was then called the Continuing Education Department came to Tom Franklin and I and said he'd had requests for years to put a conference together on topics related to spirituality and wellness and alternative healing. And would we be interested in doing that? And we said yes, and so we've been going ever since. - I think that you're in the department of human development and family studies. Where does that fall in terms of the broad scope of what you'd learn at a university? A human development, I mean, maybe all of university should be human development. Family studies, maybe that's a sociology. Where do you fit in that entire schematic? - Well, the tradition of family studies, I have a doctorate from Purdue University in family studies and family studies owes its origins to really three different areas. One is family sociology, one is to family therapy and the other area is to go back to the origin of home economics. So out of those different areas came scholars who were interested in studying family life. Different universities have combined it in different ways. It was again typically in the area around home economics. Right now, we're at UW Stout in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences. It's similar to family sociology, but our students learn maybe more specifically about internal family dynamics. And most of them are preparing to go out and do some sort of human services work. They're gonna become therapists or social workers or what have you. And to do something related to spirituality and alternative healing is not typically done in human development and family studies. It just happens to be my own personal sort of tweak on the field. I mean, there are a number of scholars who are interested in this sort of thing in my field, but it's certainly not a mainstream focus within family studies. - What is the purpose of the conference in general? I mean, what's the purpose of body, mind and spirit if you have put it in a single sentence? - To educate the public about a holistic way of looking at life. - You've got this word spirit involved in there. And a lot of times there's real hesitation to involve too much spirit in the academic environment. Has it been well received over the last 13 years? - It depends on who you ask. Clearly there are some of my colleagues who are highly skeptical of anything claiming to focus on spirituality, but the chancellor of the university has publicly acknowledged our work. His wife has actually presented a few times over the years as a presenter. A number of the deans on our campus have been strong supporters of our conference. So it's really been a mixed bag. You get many people in academia who have a materialist worldview that they think that the only thing that exists is matter and that there's nothing of a spiritual quality to life or to the universe. And then there's a small group of us who think otherwise. William James was one of the most important American scholars. He's considered a father of American psychology and American philosophy. And he said almost 100 years ago that what was needed at the time was what he called a radical empiricism, which meant people who were willing to look at the world and study it, not just including the things that we typically look at in psychology or sociology or family studies, but one that also included what he called religious phenomena. But today we would use the term spiritual phenomena to describe the concept that he was getting at, to actually look seriously at whether or not there are spiritual experiences that people have, whether there are spiritual phenomena and what impact would they make in our lives. - When you put it that way, it makes complete sense. Let's talk about the specific program that you have for the upcoming, the end of October session of the Body, Mind, and Spirit Conference. You have a pre-conference and a main conference, kind of different focuses of foci for those two. What are you trying to convey this year? - Well, the main conference has always been the weekend conference and in the past, we've always had a two-day main conference and a one-day pre-conference. And given the economy, we've actually had to cut back and we eliminated the Sunday program that we always have had the previous 12 years. So our Saturday focus is grounded in the work of our keynote speaker and that's a typical pattern for us. We find a person and a theme that works together and our keynote speaker on Saturday is Andrew Harvey, who is a very well-known scholar of spirituality and mysticism. He's written over 20 books. He has personally experienced mystical visionary types of experiences. He's written about it. He studied it from a scholarly perspective. And so he's going to come and talk about what he calls sacred activism, which is using spiritual practices like mindfulness and meditation and prayer to help people to ground themselves, to feel more at peace, to feel stronger, more courageous and more enthusiastic about going out and helping to solve the problems of the world. And so he really gives us a beginning to our day on Saturday. And then there'll be a variety of workshops and presenters talking about many other related things. We've got yoga and tai chi and qigong. We've got relationships, meditation, a variety of different topics that will be presented during the day on Saturday. So that's our main event is Saturday's main conference. The pre-conference on Friday tends to have a focus that's a little bit more professionally oriented, not that you might not be a professional and attend Saturday as well. The pre-conference workshop on Friday is two family therapists from California. They're going to be talking about something that might not even make a whole lot of sense to people outside of the field of therapy, but is a very important issue for people who are practicing therapists and social workers in the human services field. It's about the ethical issues involved in transference and counter-transference in the relationship between the therapist and client or the human service professional and their client. What that really means in simple everyday language is that the relationship between the client and the therapist is also affected by the feelings that they have for each other, both good and bad, and also how those feelings may be impacted by other similar types of relationships that they may have had in their life. And the focus of the workshop is Kylia Taylor is one of the two presenters. She wrote a book about 10 years ago called The Ethics of Caring. And it's all about how we need to be compassionate and maybe even more aware than ever as a therapist. And obviously you have to be aware as a therapist about ethical issues anyway. But when there become issues of transference or counter-transference, what ethical issues does that need for the therapist to be super aware about? And then how to use compassion to help address those issues. So it's all about ethics and compassion as it relates to the therapeutic relationship. - And in addition to these speakers and some of the other activities I've noticed on a notice you put out, there's a whole bunch of other open exhibit hall events, features, resources. You want to mention a little bit about those? - Absolutely, we always have an exhibit space. And so we'll have people who will be doing body work like massage therapy or Reiki healing. We have people who sell various different products, nutritional food supplements, specific drinks. The Nican people are usually there selling the products that the Nican company sells that often relate to the use of magnets for healing purposes. So we have a variety of different things. Jewelry and clothing and books and music. Many, many different things all relating to sort of seeing the world in a holistic way, trying to help improve our health, both physical and mental and spiritual, improving our relationships and our relationship with the earth. And we also have a labyrinth every year. It's a cloth or canvas labyrinth that we rent from a church in Twin Cities and people can come and walk the labyrinth as a form of walking meditation. It's a wonderful, wonderful technique. And many people in your listening audience in the Eau Claire area may come to some of the outdoor labyrinths that I know that are in the area as well. - How many people come to this? Or how many could you hold without busting down the walls? - Well, it varies. We've had some years where we had 160, 200 people. That was in the early years when this was a fairly new topic and was considered very cutting edge back in the 90s. And as time went on, this idea of talking about these kinds of things became more mainstream in our society. And so people didn't seek us out quite as much like they had in the past because they were sort of finding other outlets for it. The kind of conference we do is being replicated at many different universities and hospitals these days have body-minded spirit programs or health and wellness programs. And of course, the economy's been really hurting us the last couple of years as so many people are finding it harder to make ends meet financially and so money that goes to what they might consider to be a luxury like attending a workshop program like we have. So this year, we're hoping that we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 80 people, say, on Saturday as opposed to numbers twice that high in the late 90s. - I wanna ask you more about the program in a moment. But first of all, I wanna make sure people know where to go to get information. What's the easy way for them to find information about the body-minded spirit conference? - Well, there's two simple routes to go. One is to go to our website. And that would be www.uwstout.edu/outreach/bmss for body-minded spirit. So www.uwstout.edu/outreach/bmss. And so that will take you to the conference site and you can even register online if people would like to do that. The other way to do that is if you have questions is to actually contact the office itself. The office means the outreach services office, it's doubt. And their phone number is 715-232-2793. - And perhaps an even easier way to do it is to come to my site, which is northernspiritradio.org. I'll have a link there. I'll have the phone number so people can track you down. So let's talk more about the conference and your speakers because this topic of sacred activism that Andrew Harvey is gonna be presenting on, that's one that's deeply related to my work with spirit and action. I wanna hold up the example of people who are rooted in spirit and doing good work for the world. Let's start with you personally, Bob. Are you a sacred activist? - I try very hard to be. - I'm very involved on many different levels from the very personal to the collective and social. I'm involved in sustainability practices, working with a group called Sustainable Done, working on sustainability practices for the University of Wisconsin Stout, I'm the chair of the Peak Oil Committee, the Western Wisconsin Peak Oil Alliance, it's called. On a personal level, I do workshops on meditation, on spirituality, I lead worship services on Sunday mornings as a part of an interfaith worship service and I try to live a very green life, riding my bike to work and things like that. - Sounds like a wonderful variety of ways that you're living out of spirit, exactly in tune with, but I hope to lift up as part of spirit and action. You know, when you say that you lead interfaith service, you know, what does that mean? Is this something that's for Christians? Is it Jews, Buddhists, maybe atheists? Who can come to this? - Well, anyone who was interested could come. And since we've been talking about the Body Minded Spirit Conference, I want to make a clear distinction between the work that I'm doing on my Sunday worship service and the work I do for the University because obviously it would be inappropriate for a professor at the University to be proselytizing their particular religious beliefs. But what I work on in my own work is creating an environment where people can come regardless of their faith tradition. They can hear the sacred scriptures of all of the different faiths of the world as we have time for in a given week and as a particular theme would make a given reading appropriate. We honor all the religions of the world in a form of dialogue to try to promote peace and unity for the world. Some of the people in our group are Hindus, some are Christians, one was raised in a Jewish family in New York, one of them is a Buddhist monk who was raised in Burma. - Sounds like quite a variety. What kind of religious backgrounds do you come from and how do you come to be leading worship services? - Well, I was raised in a Christian family, a liberal Protestant family in Massachusetts. And when I was in junior high and high school, the church that I attended had worship services that were actually led by the high school students about four weeks out of five and then the youth minister led the fifth service. And so I actually started leading worship services from the time that I was about a freshman or a sophomore in high school. I was very interested in that at the time. I was involved as a college student in being on the advisory board for the Protestant chaplaincy at the University of Maine was involved in helping to provide some leadership and service there, although I didn't directly lead the services. Later on in life, I was interested in studying about the world's religions. And so I attended through a distance education program, a program called the Interfaith Ministry Program at the New Seminary in New York. And I actually didn't do it to lead worship services. I was just curious for myself. But then I got talking to other people in Menominee and a number of us realized that there would be an interest in having a service that was not exclusively a Christian service or Jewish or Buddhist or any other particular faith, but one that was a place for dialogue amongst all of the religions. And so we started planning that in the spring of 1999 and we've been going for over 10 years now. - How would that differ from what you might find at a unitarian universalist surface? - In some ways they're similar. And I was a unitarian universalist for a few years here in Menominee and even when I was down at Purdue University in Indiana, the difference is that we will use words like God or goddess or source or creator, Allah, Yahweh, Wakantanka will use a lot of different names from different cultures. And all of the people in our group because of the people who choose to be there are all comfortable with those words. Whereas when I've done presentations or been a member of a unitarian society, I have found that some of the people there are comfortable with that language. And some are not that some of the unitarians I think see themselves more as atheists or as agnostic and to hear someone make a reference to the name God or Allah, I think that it maybe provokes a mixed response in the community. So the things that I do in our service, I've actually led in unitarian services. It's just that I think there's a little bit more explicitly religious focus in our interfaith worship and maybe not quite as much focus on social engagement in solving the problems 'cause we've got a really small community. We only have 10 to 15 or 16 people at our services. And so it's difficult for us to have as much of an engagement in making such a big impact on the community as a larger congregation might. - I think that from my own experience with Quaker meetings that smaller group can really provide very valuable leaven to the community. And it seems to me that what you're doing with the Body Mind and Spirit Conference is that kind of leaven. This isn't a congregation, you're planting seeds and they grow as the other people are receptive to them. The Body Mind and Spirit Conference coming up again, October 31st is the main conference on that Saturday. And on the 30th, you have the pre-conference which is on inner ethics, examining counter-transference with compassion. Again, people can get to information on that conference via mysite, northernspiritadio.org. But Bob, one of the questions that comes up about dealing with this kind of stuff, transpersonal psychology is one of the topics. These things, in the academic environment, the question is, are they effective? So I just wanna ask you, have you heard either anecdotally or some kind of systematic reporting that what was presented in your conference has worked to change the world? I mean, that's what I'm after when I'm doing Spirit in Action. - On our small scale, I think that anyone who had attended over the past 12 years would answer in the affirmative. Many times, people say that the community that they felt in those two days was a powerful experience and helped them to feel like they had the energy and the courage and the spirit to go back into their life to try to help make a difference. We've had even one case I can remember of a woman who actually came to spend her last days of life at our conference. She was about to die and she and her daughter came to our conference because that was how she wanted to spend her last few days on earth. We're being in a community of people talking about wellness and talking about healing and talking about spirituality. We've had a few sessions where, right there in the room, at the time, either a session like among shaman who did a healing ceremony. There was a therapist who teaches down at Marquette University, a knee shake, doctor a knee shake who did some imagery healing with a man who was basically healed of about a 20 year illness, I think it was. I don't remember the exact length of time. He'd been a teenage boy and here he was a man in his 30s, I think. So it was about 20, 25 years and he'd been suffering for a long, long time and one 20 minute session in the conference helped provide significant improvement for him and I talked with Tom Franklin who used to be the co-chair of the conference and he followed up with this man six months later and then even a few years later and the man still did not have any of the pain that he'd been suffering for so many years. So we've seen direct experience of healing and there was another story Tom was telling once about in our first or second, maybe third year of our conference, there was this healing that took place that I was just talking about and someone at our university heard a story about the healing and this man was losing his eyesight and he woke up the next morning and felt that his eyesight was getting better which was completely the opposite of the direction his eyesight had been going for many, many years and he went to his doctor and took his glasses off and could actually read the chart and the doctor called a world expert done in Madison said have you ever heard of a case like this before where guys eyes actually got better after having this health problem and the guys said I've only heard of maybe one or two cases in the whole world. So we've had a few really spectacular examples of healing but much more important other than the few cases like that are the hundreds and hundreds of people who felt energized, who felt love, who felt compassion, who felt community at our conference and used that to help them maybe to work through some depression that they've been suffering or to engage in trying to help make the world a better place to be a Terry Gipps a few years ago who's a famous expert here in the upper Midwest talking about living sustainably and so we've had many people who've been very engaged I think as a result of the conference that they've attended. - Very promising work you're doing and you've been doing it with great dedication for more than a decade. Thank you so much Bob for the work you're doing both on the organizational level and on the personal level I think that both of those are extremely important to our planet. Thank you for putting on for these many years now the Body Mind and Spirit Conference coming up to over 30 to 31st. People can check out my website again for more details. Thank you for joining me for spirit in action. - Thank you very much and I hope people come this year because our numbers have been dropping and this may end up being our last year. - Thanks again Bob. - Good, thanks a lot Mark. - That was my first spirit in action guest today Bob Salt of the University of Wisconsin-Stouts Human Development and Family Studies Department and co-organizer for the 13th Annual Body Mind Spirit Conference. Find a link and the phone via my northernspiritradio.org site. This is a Northern spirit radio production called spirit in action. And I'm your host Mark Helpsmeet. Check my site to follow up with links on my guests and please drop us a comment when you visit. We love two-way communication. Next up for spirit in action is one of the presenters for the Body Mind Spirit Conference, Celine Vega. She's a moving spirit but her website is spiritmoving.com. Celine is a therapist and much, much more. And she joins us today by phone from Seattle, Washington. Celine, thanks so much for joining me for spirit in action. - I'm glad to be here. - I think your normal haunt is Santa Cruz but I think you're up in Washington state at the moment. Is this a Northern migration as winter comes on? - Oh, I don't know, I wish it was a Southern migration as winter came on. Santa Cruz is my husband's and my long-term home. And we have a place in the mountains there where we actually host and teach workshops on a regular basis. But for the last few years, we've been up here in the Seattle area following his job for a little while. We do intend to get back there hopefully soon. - In these workshops that you've lead, you've been leading them, your husband leading them. You lead them with Kailia like as you're going to be doing at UW-Stout in a couple of weeks. - Yeah, my husband is not so involved in the leading of the workshop. So though he helps a lot when we're sponsoring someone else's workshop. We actually built a straw bill off the grid home up there in the mountains and realized as we were building it that because we were building a studio space for me to see clients and have workshops, we could actually bring in some of our friends to have workshops there that were not just the ones I was teaching. And out of that developed a number of workshops, some of which I teach with someone else. And the inner ethics workshop that I teach with Kailia is definitely one of the ones we do up there. It's a wonderful space with 73 acres, which means that we can do this deep work in a workshop setting and then people have a chance to go out into wonderful setting and integrate some of what's going on for them and the really transformative workshops that we have there. - The workshop that you're leading with Kailia Taylor, I understand it's based on her book, The Ethics of Caring. Did that come first? Or is this work with you part of what originated the book? How did that develop? - No, actually the book came first. I actually met Kailia a little bit before the book came out, which is 15 years ago now. It's been in print for almost 15 years. Part of the basis of our getting to know each other was working in a peer consultation group together, where we could bring in other work we were doing with clients, we're both psychotherapists and we would meet with a few other people and all of us have a chance to bring in the issues that come up when you're dealing with clients that are beyond just the client issues, but also looking at how we were with those clients. That's really what ethics is very much about. And so in those consultation group meetings, I just came to really value Kailia's sense of ethics and we continue to deepen our relationship, both as friends and colleagues in this regard, specifically working on ethics together. So the workshop that we're doing together, although it began with her work in the book and with workshops she was doing is now evolving as I've gotten involved with it. And I'm actually gonna be putting together a manual to go with the book that is for supervisors and people working with others to learn this model and help them to work with it in their own work. - The full title of the workshop that you're gonna be doing at UW Stout on October 30th is Inner Ethics Examining Counter-Transference with Compassion. Now, I'm not a therapist, my wife is, and so I've heard of transference before. Counter-transference, I'm not quite solid on and treating with compassion. What does this mean? What's this about? What are you gonna be training people to do on that Friday? - I'll start with the question of compassion because although it's the last one in the title, it's in some ways the heart of the model. By compassion in this sense, we're talking about not just the compassion that we feel for others, but especially the compassion that we need to feel for ourselves. A lot of people have a real reaction to ethics. They feel like they're going to run right into an inner or outer critic and will be shamed for what they did wrong. I think that's often what comes up when we think of ethics. Oh my God, I did something wrong. But the model that we work with here is really just about self-reflection and compassion and being able to bring a loving presence to ourselves and to our own behaviors as therapists so that we can reorient ourselves into what we call right relationship in caring for clients. So if we made a mess somewhere along the way, rather than beating ourselves up over it, which isn't actually very helpful for what we do in the future, we can bring that compassion to ourselves and say, okay, what happened there? How did I get so off track from what my original intentions were in really being with this client in a way that could help or at least do no harm? So the compassion part is really an important part of what we're doing. The counter-transference, it's an interesting term, counter-transference. Originally, when Freud and others way back when started talking about transference, which is what happens when a client in particular begins to project onto the therapist, things that are really not from the real person of that therapist, but rather from their own childhood issues with parents, issues with other authority figures in their lives, all of a sudden the therapist becomes that, even though they may have not done very much that seems like that original parent or authority figure. And that actually can be a very, very important part of therapy as that gets worked through and the client gets to see who is really here and what is the real relationship we're having rather than the projected one from childhood. Counter-transference is usually the word used for what happens in the therapist in regards to the client. So when I'm reacting to something about my client, which may or may not have to do with something real in them, I might be having the same kind of reaction my client has of bringing something from my own childhood into our session, even though my intention is to be a really clear channel as therapists, I do have my own issues and they are gonna show up sometimes, particularly if there's some issue that triggers one of my own issues. So that gets called counter-transference. They're really the same thing, they really are. But when the therapist is doing it, it gets called counter-transference, as opposed to transference. And the model as we work with it here, what we're doing is looking at that counter-transference that comes up and how it can be, if it's the stuff that's our own issues, then we wanna look at how we can deal with our own issues outside of that therapy relationship and just note that it's coming up. So if I have a reaction to a client, I might notice that I'm having it if I'm doing the kind of self-reflection that we're talking about here. And then I can not do it to the client, I can take it out of the room later on and bring it to a colleague and say, oh my gosh, when I was in there with my client, I found myself, oh say, being jealous of the fact that they are able to travel everywhere and I don't get to do that. And that really colored what I was about to say next to them or even what I really did say to them. And now I need to really look at my own stuff about that and how my jealousy got in the way of really being there for the client. So it's the self-reflection, it's not that people do that and we wanna eliminate it altogether 'cause that's just not possible. But if we can bring self-reflection into the mix, then we can continue to reorient into right relationship and every moment when we start feeling ourselves getting sidetracked by our own counter-transferants or our own reactions that are not really about the client but about our own stuff getting in the way. - You know, I think it'd be helpful to me if you could give me a couple more examples, Celine. I'm not sure I understand as a therapist, sitting there what actually happens with the therapist in that role, is it that maybe you have a tendency you wanna spank the client because they've been naughty and you know, I shouldn't be violent like that. So give me more examples so I can understand this dynamic. - Okay, well I'll go from the spanking one here because although I've never had the impulse to spank a client, I've certainly found myself sometimes being annoyed or irritated at something, right? Let's say I've come up with some really, brilliant interpretation that I've presented to them of something that they said. And rather than having a moment of, oh, you're so right, no, I understand all my problems. Instead, they said, no, that's not it. And I might find myself feeling like, well, you're not getting it, you know? Here I am presenting you with my brilliant understanding and you're not getting it. Well, in that moment, I've completely moved out of being there for my client and thinking about what is going to be the most healing for them and moved into my own need for approval or for respect or for someone to think I'm smart, which has nothing to do with my client's needs at all. And I hopefully will notice that that's happened and not just pursue the course of yelling at my client for not understanding how brilliant my interpretation was, but instead check that, put it aside to look at later when I can do some examination of what went on in me at that time and come back to, what is my client need right now in this moment? What's going on for them? In that moment, what might be going on for them is, God, this therapist isn't getting it. Or she's coming up with some idea that has nothing to do with what I'm feeling. And so I might say something like, oh, you know, I really hear that what I just said really didn't fit for you. So I really would like to hear more about what's going on for you that I just clearly didn't get. I really want to understand it. So you see where I've done there, I've redirected myself from my own reaction of irritation and not feeling seen, which isn't appropriate for me in the therapist role to what is appropriate for me in the therapist role, which is to really see and be there for my client and follow the course of what their process is needing at that moment to be a healing process. And who is this aimed at? On the 30th of October, they call that a pre-conference for the Body Mind Spirit Conference, which actually happens on Saturday. Who is the target audience that you and Kailia want to have listening to, learning from, taking away these extra techniques in order to be better therapists, I guess. So maybe it's therapists, is it all kinds of therapists? Is it non-therapists as well? - It's actually anybody who's in any kind of helping relationship with a client can benefit from this. I know Kailia has done this workshop with people who are hospice workers, people who work with all-tropic breath work. That's part of her background is all-tropic breath work. There are many, many, many instances where people are trying to be in right relationship with a client and it doesn't have to just be therapists. But I think who we're expecting most at this conference will be therapists who are wanting to deepen their work and not just kind of go along the way they always have been, but find new levels in themselves that they can learn from. I see these issues, dealing with ethics issues is a way of dropping down to a deeper place in ourselves rather than just being in a role or having an identity as therapist when I'm sitting in the room with someone. So I find it a way to deepen my work as a therapist. Although we're expecting there will certainly be therapists in training and people who are just learning about the process of being therapists, this is definitely not just for them. I think for most therapists, the ethics training that comes along with the graduate school process is a lot more about what are the ethics codes or standards of practice that we need to follow. What are the legal considerations we need to keep in mind when we're sitting with the client? Those are the things that they make sure to teach us in our graduate school programs, but they don't often take the time to help us look at ethics as well as our own spiritual and deepening process which I really believe it is. - I think you, Celine, work with a wide range of people. I don't think you're just sitting there doing talk therapy or EMDR, DNMS, whenever those kind of techniques. I think movement is part of what you do because your website is spiritmoving.com. And I see all kinds of interesting things on here. And so tell me a little bit about what's in your grab bag. Where do you draw your techniques from to do the kind of healing work that you do for the world? - Well, I actually came from a movement background. I was a dancer, but I always felt like performance dance wasn't really somehow the main thing for me. It really wasn't what it was about. I was more interested in how movement was used as a way of connecting with ourselves in a deep way, connecting with each other, connecting with whatever spiritual realities we understand there to be out there or in here. I saw movement and the arts in general as amazing ways to connect us to a part of ourselves that is underneath our usual conversing self in the world. It's really easy to get distracted or sidetracked by the social selves that we bring into the world that we've learned really well, will work for us to get us moving forward in our daily life. And then we lose some of those deeper places. And I found that movement in particular is such an amazing way to drop people into that deeper place. I use a lot of hypnosis techniques for that as well. And by hypnosis here, I don't mean the kind of common idea just using the connection with the unconscious mind to fix some problem, like overeating or smoking, but rather to use it as a way of having communication with the unconscious parts of us that often we don't get to have that connection with except maybe in dreams. So expressive arts techniques, hypnosis techniques, a lot of ways that we can drop down into those deeper parts of ourselves to connect not just with ourselves, but then to connect with each other from that place. That's in terms of the means that I use. I think that pretty much covers it. So does that mean if someone comes to you for therapy? Do they name what kind of therapy, treatment, help you're going to be giving them? Or do you say, "Okay, well, let's start moving." Or, I mean, most people when they go into a therapist's office, I think they sit down. Is that your first move? (laughing) - Well, it does usually happen. That way, even with the people who come because right there on my card, it says psychotherapy and movement. And that movement actually attracts a lot of people who then come and sit down and say they want to be doing some movement with me, but when it comes time to say, "Well, perhaps what you're just expressing to me in words, we might begin to work with with some movement. Would you be willing to do that?" And often the response is, "I'm not ready to do that yet." It can feel incredibly revealing to open into the world of the body, the somatic world for people. Sometimes when they're alone in the room with me, it takes developing some trust in the ways that they're used to relating before we can get into those territories. I actually find it a lot easier to open up to that when I'm leading groups or teaching workshops, because there's a certain permission that happens when everybody else around you is doing it too, and people can feel a little bit more lost in a good way in the crowd so they don't feel so vulnerable and on display when they start to move in a way that can be very revealing of deep parts of themselves. But if they have all these other people moving around them, including the teacher, it can make it feel a little easier to take that risk. And go into that realm. And powerful, powerful things can come out when we do that. It's part of what I like to teach and do workshops and group work even more than individual work, because there are so many more possibilities that people are willing to enter into with me. - It's clear that you've got a powerful vision going on here of the kind of work you can do. And I'm also very clear, just from listening to you, from looking at your website, that it's rooted in a spiritual sense that you have. I imagine you've got a lifelong spiritual journey. Can you tell me about some of the stops on that and how you get to the place where you list things like eco-psychology and spiritual emergence on your website? Where have you been? Where are you going? I'm sure there's some kind of a path or a doorway you're looking toward. - Well, that's a pretty broad question here. It's true that I feel like I've been on a spiritual quest for most of my life. And I can say that at the very, very beginnings of it, coming from a family that was, my grandparents were very deeply into their orthodox Judaism. And that wasn't so much something that drew either my mother or myself. My mother, on the other hand, was a dancer who always had a statue of Shiva in the house because Shiva being the god of dance, as well as other things, that felt like something that she could connect with. So from the very beginning was exposed to a very eclectic mix of virtual paths and understandings of what it means to connect with divinity, really. And started exploring that pretty early on in my teens. And I really do feel quite eclectic about what I bring in. And I'm usually able to relate to just about anybody who comes into my practice with any kind of a spiritual path as long as there's room for some tolerance in their path for other paths, then I can go anywhere with anyone. For me, the path has been much more earth-based than it is, I think, for everyone out there. Meaning that I felt a real connection with the earth as a way of finding my own connection with the divine, not just that it's only about the earth, but that's often a channel that when I open to it, opens me to what's even beyond that. So that is part of what got me to ecopsychology, which is really looking at our relationship with the earth and how we're treating it. You know, it's interesting, I bring the same kind of sense of how to work with the earth and our relationship with it that I bring to ethics, which is we've got to come to it with a sense of compassion, self-compassion, if we're going to be able to make changes in how we do it. So in terms of the earth, if I'm just busy yelling at myself for, you know, driving too much or for all the ways that I contribute to what can go wrong in the world around us, that's not going to help me to make any changes in my behavior. Ecopsychology is really a matter of looking at what we know about the psychology of how people change behaviors, among other things, and perspectives, and applying it to how we're living our lives, that can be pretty self-destructive in terms of this earth that we are living on. And if we're going to change that, can we use some of what we know about psychology to begin to change that and to understand what went wrong with our relationship with the earth that we're doing so many destructive things? The ecopsychology piece of this actually tends to be a little more expensive, the involvements that I've had with it at least. I got to it by a small group of therapists in Santa Cruz area who I used to meet with. We were calling ourselves world awareness therapists at first, and then I think we went for therapists for social responsibility, we tried different names on. But the main thing that brought us together was a sense that when our clients came into the room and started talking about their deep distress at what was going on in the world around them, whether it be cutting down at the redwood trees around them, or whether it was horrible things happening in the war zones. The traditional psychotherapeutic approach to that or a more psychoanalytic approach was to look at that in terms of what it meant about their relationship with their father or something like that. It's something in their own childhood that was being referred to in a symbolic way by the actual events in the world. Our group of therapists said, you know, there may be pieces of that and we do want to keep that in mind as we're working with someone, but there's also the reality of distress about trees being cut down and, you know, rapes and violence going on in parts of the world. And that's real. People are going to, if they're tuned in at all, they are going to have powerful distress reactions to that. Helping people to find their way through that, both in terms of accepting the horrors that can go on in the world and finding their way to being as activist as they need to be to feel good about themselves. Those are all part of our role as therapists as well as looking at how their childhood patterning may have increased just how much distress they're having about that. So that's kind of a lengthy discussion of eco-psychology, but I think it really does actually even relate to the ethics work that we do, too, because I consider my ethical relationship with a client to be in the context of the entire world that we're living in and not just in terms of the inner world of that client's childhood. I think I want to spring something on you that occurred to me just yesterday as I was sitting in the silence of the Quaker meeting we have here in Eau Claire. I tend to be a terminal extrovert. I can constantly be out there interacting with people. I don't really need quiet time in the same way. My wife are a lot of very sensible people in my immediate environment, too. So I'm very happy to be out there and be very active in peace, justice, care for creation, or all things that call to me deeply. And so when I sat down and worship yesterday, I was aware that I was being called to think about this and this and this and this, and I was aware that I felt unrooted. And the image that came to me was how I'm a plant. And there is a phase where plants are putting out branches and leaves, and it's really important for them to reach out. But then there's also important times, and as winter comes on, we're aware of it, for plants to sink down their roots and to be very rooted. And some plants put a lot of energy into building the root system to prepare for a winter. But that balance, the leaves going up and the roots going down, is for me, or was for me yesterday as I was sitting with this, a very strong spiritual call for me to balance my branches and leaves reaching up, doing work in the world and my roots being down in the world. And that feels like an arrow of equal psychology. So what's your reaction to that big mishmash of image that I had? Oh, I love it. That's a beautiful, beautiful image. And you're right. It does very much relate to eco-psychology, because what we're talking about there is not just being activists out there to save the earth, but that we have to also do our own work of sinking the roots down, if we're going to be able to come from, come from a spiritually connected place in our activism. But it actually, that image brought up a whole other aspect of work that I do, which I had not mentioned when you asked about my grab bag of what I bring to things, and that's the chakra system, because that image speaks to me very much of the way that I work with the chakra system. People often think of the chakra system as these energy centers in the body or in the being, and what's going on in each one of them as it may reflect in our lives. But I think the piece that is the most important about the chakra system in the way is that it is, it's not just bounded at the crown of our head, and at our feet or our tailbone, it goes down into the earth, and that's where we're connecting our energies to the earth, and it opens up into the divine at the top, so that we are connected beings when we're at our most spiritually connected. We're connected to both of those sources of energy and spiritual connection. So, yeah, your image really speaks to me on a lot of different levels to have both ends opening and reaching out into the world. - There's another item that's on the side menu on your spiritmoving.com site, and there you refer to spiritual emergence, and as soon as people click on that, they'll see an article or a book that you wrote called Spiritual Emergence or Psychosis. And I think I'm dealing with a friend right now who's writing that crux, she had a very deep spiritual experience back in January, which people around her, they reacted to it as if it was Psychosis. And yet she can talk to me about this because we speak on spiritual levels as well. Tell me about what you're talking about in that article, that book, and what kind of work you do about that. - That was an article that I wrote, and actually it's interesting, I wrote that article before I even met Kylia or came in contact with the Spiritual Emergence Network. That all happened later on. This has been an interest of mine for a long time, that there's a realm that people enter into that is a big topic, and so I'm not gonna go into all the neuroscience pieces of this because I think there are quite a few actually that are also very interesting, but I'm not as up on that to be able to expound that link. But I think what I wanna express here is that the realms that someone who is in what we often call a psychotic state, the realms that they're exploring are really the same territory as the mystics explore, and the only difference really is that the mystics know how to swim in those waters, and the psychotic is drowning. There are many things that people who are really actually in a psychotic state may say that are spiritually quite profound, but they've lost enough of a witness consciousness to be able to have that go on and stay connected at the same time, whereas the mystic is able to stay connected to everything, to the whole shebang, the life of moving through this world in a body, and that amazing mystical realm that the psychotic is exploring, often in a very difficult way. The spiritual emergence process often, when it comes on, people can get lost for a while, and the idea of the spiritual emergence network that both Kylie and I were involved in for quite a while is that there are ways of being with someone who is in that kind of a state that can help them to find their way through the process to a point where they can be more balanced, where they can have their feet on the ground, and their connection to that spiritual realm and it can be so very different than this world that we walk in, but at first sometimes they're kind of lost, so rather than putting them in hospitals and giving them drugs, if we could perhaps give them a place to go where they could have their basic needs taken care of, and they wouldn't have to worry about making dinner and driving around and doing their daily life 'cause that would be taken care of, and to have someone who could sit with them and be grounded to give them some grounding in which to do whatever process they need to go through and come back to a place where they can integrate the spiritual insights and amazing things that happened to them while they were in that realm into their daily life, very much like a shamanic initiation process, really, except that our culture doesn't really set up to help people through it very well. - Well, on the 30th of October, you're gonna be in my neck of the woods, gonna fly over here, I'm assuming, and you and Kylia Taylor are gonna be co-leading a workshop called Inner Ethics Examining Counter-Transference with Compassion. That's gonna be at the Body Mind Spirit Conference at the UW Stout in Menominee, Wisconsin. You come in the day before, are you staying for the next day, too, when Andrew Harvey is speaking and all kinds of other good things are going on? - Yes, I'm so glad we get to pay (laughs) because it sounds like a really wonderful conference and I'm really glad to be part of starting it up and getting everybody warmed up and then being part of the larger conference that'll be happening because it just sounds like a gathering of a lot of people who are gonna have a chance to connect with kindred spirits, and that's always exciting to me. Sometimes I think a lot of us, depending on where we are out in the country, can often feel very isolated if we're bringing spirituality into the work that we do as therapists, and it's really nice to get together with others who share that understanding of just how deep this work is that we're doing. - We've been speaking with Celine Vega. Her website is spiritmoving.com and she does so much good work in the world. I wanna thank you Celine for visiting with me and I look forward to perhaps even seeing you on the 30th of October when you're here at the UW Stout. Thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Oh, you're very welcome Mark, thanks a lot. - My final Spirit in Action guest was Celine Vega, website spiritmoving.com. Psychotherapist and as you heard much, much more. Besides the Body Mind Spirit Conference in Menominee, Wisconsin on October 30th and 31st, there's the first Ways of Peace Conference, this one on Christian non-violence on October 31st. Go to fnvw.org or find it via my northernspiritradio.org site. Two great conference opportunities that same weekend. I guess the upper Midwest is the place to be as October ends. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ I'm feeling ♪