Beyond all the theories, approaches, and techniques, for me therapeutic companionship is a bearing witness to the life of another as they come to befriend themselves in a way that wasn’t possible until now.
To excavate meaning where meaning has been annihilated, to mine purpose in the core of the purposelessness, to somehow bear that which has previously been unbearable.
This befriending is not passive, but fierce and alive, and the activity of psychic revolution, which is the movement of love itself.
It is the light shining out of the core of the dark night, the outrageousness of the human spirit, and the basic goodness of the human heart.
Together, we stand on the rooftop and declare that grief is not pathology, despair is not pathology, heartbreak is not pathology. Instead, they are path.
Grieving and weeping are not manifestations of illness, but of a sacred, linking thread.
At times, we’ll be invited to walk into the dark wood with another, into the disorienting and hopeless places, without knowing where the journey will lead, if we will make it out in one piece, or if and where new life will be found.
We will be asked to make sense together of where they’ve been, who they’ve come to imagine themselves to be, and what they are longing to become. To discover what matters most to them and cradle it in our shared heart.
To gather the pieces of the broken world into a holy vase and place it on an altar in front of us, holding the shards of soul who have been scattered, now longing to return home.
And participate in a sacred assembly that is gathering before our very eyes, an assembly of the shattered.
It is awesome, in the truest sense of the word, to bear witness in this way. To fall to the ground in the beholding of the divine in action, of the unstoppable wild bravery of the human spirit, and the relentlessness and creativity of love as it makes its way into form.
We can start wherever we are, right now, in this moment. And allow ourselves to be crafted as a vessel for love to make its way here.
Photo by Annie Spratt
