One of the questions I pose in the aquatic healer profiles on this site is: What were your most challenging lessons in training and practice.
It's a question that requires a great deal of self-honesty. It is also one that if asked of ourselves on an ongoing basis is very valuable.
When I first started training in massage, I had the fortune to come across a book called The Way of the Physician (or wounded healer) by Jacob Needleman. I read it on the train as I traveled to my training. and I believe it kept me humble. Perhaps many people who choose to study the healing arts do so because they are in need of healing themselves. It's a good choice but only if conducted with consciousness.
As experienced practitioners, we do well always to evaluate our own wounds and how they might interface with those of our clients in ways that interfere with, or even harm, the therapeutic relationships we are engaged in. For this reason, it is helpful to continue to be a receiver of the work you are offering and to put yourself in the role of client on a regular basis. Whether giver or receiver, we are in the same river of life.
A journey into the unconscious
In my experience, aquatic bodywork enables a journey into the unconscious. It has a risk attached to it that very few seem to acknowledge. I've noticed that when people struggling with our modern society first experience this therapeutic modality, some wonder if they have touched a forgotten paradise. They may have a deep recollection of that paradise, but they also access the common grief of humanity.
For some the experience is too disturbing to handle and they never again risk surrendering to the water. Others set out to share the work as practitioners but do not dare dive into their own woundedness (also called shadow). Either way, something that temporarily surfaced is submerged again in our everyday efforts to live and prosper in consensual reality.
Knights come to the table of the King, feast and enjoy the sight of the Grail procession but they remain silent about the wound. This is the dance of male/female, yin/yang, light/dark, or contrasting energies, that each of us possesses. And most of us receive wounds that unbalance us, such that we seek to redress this unconsciously (silent about the wound) or consciously (aware of the wound).
Some wounded healers are tempted to hide behind denial of their pain, perhaps to feel that they are doing good by doing healing work for others. I have come to see that it takes a great deal of personal humility and integrity to practice any form of healing, and especially this one - aquatic bodywork. Until we are willing to ask what is wrong with the 'King' or what the purpose of our work is, the wound continues to fester.
This problem has sometimes manifest as a kind of 'spiritual bypassing', and is as harmful as scientific dismissal to explorations of all dimensions of aquatic therapy. Although Watsu-style aquatic bodywork is now popular in both relatively superficial spa-leisure settings and mostly symptom-solving physical therapy clinics, it has far deeper implications and affects that are not much written about. This concerns and interests me.
Dreams and ethics
Recognition of the value of aquatic bodywork in accessing both the personal and the collective unconscious may help us to address these oversights. I have written elsewhere about how immersion in warm water can enhance our access to the dream world. The creative energy of this experience only has lasting value if we learn how to take right action in the waking world when given insights and inspirations from the dream world.
A fundamental split in our human natures is described in one of the first recorded dreams - the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk ('He who saw the deep'). Gilgamesh's dream is an attempt to compensate for his manic grandiosity. He encounters Enkidu, a wild man, the embodiment of humanity's primordial self. Enkidu's role is to balance Gilgamesh's superego. Each one of us likely has a Gilgamesh and Enkidu inside.
This mythic dream, suggests Anthony Stevens, is possibly the earliest expression of the conflict between our civilized consciousness and the wild man/woman in us all (see Private Myths by Anthony Stevens, p. 8-9). If water (and dreams engendered by it) give us access to our unconscious then we must also learn how to work well alongside this wild man/woman. Stevens goes on to say:
'....Failure to accept ethical responsibility for the powers released from the unconscious, either by analysis or by life, can result in consequences of unqualified evil .... The Christian superego, its repression of sexuality and aggressive self-assertion undone by psychoanalytic subversion, can no longer defend us from our capacity for evil.'
'To analyse [and, I would add, to practice or receive aquatic bodywork at the depth possible in certain circumstances] is to risk the perilous journey, to encounter all the sins, the shames, cruelties, and banal evils that previous generations locked away in hell. It is the via dolorosa that cannot be shirked if one would become whole.'
It's what's known as the shadow and we must each face this before we can truly help others.
Paradise lost and found
Of course, there is still the paradisical experience of being floated as if in the womb - at once protected and free - that so many find in aquatic bodywork. And it is just this paradox that gives the work it's special potential. When we feel safe and open, then we can face that which frightens us. But only if the practitioner is fully aware of what this takes and has been there herself.
I suspect that this may have left my readers unnerved but I hope also inspired. Healing is available to us all, whether we are the healer or the healee, there is no shame in our wounds but there is certainly responsibility. Those who aspire to help others in any capacity whatsoever must first understand their own wounds and, very often, must first have overcome the same wounds that their clients face.
This subject is an important aspect of the ethics of the practice of aquatic bodywork, which will be addressed in future blog postings on Aquapoetics.
Related posts by Sulis
The age of dreaming has come
Grail legend and the Fisher King
Footnote
Here, for added interest, is an abstract of a paper published in Transcultural Psychiatry [Vol. 40, No. 2, 248-277 (2003)] which discusses the issue of the wounded healer referenced above, and links it with the Asclepian healing methods I have written of elsewhere.
Asklepian Dreams: The Ethos of the Wounded-Healer in the Clinical Encounter, Laurence J. Kirmayer
The clinical encounter is structured hierarchically: explicit technical action is embedded in levels of organization that reflect the personality and biography of the clinician, which in turn, are embedded in a larger matrix of cultural values or ethos. Systems of medicine can be compared at each of these levels. Shamanism and other elementary systems of medicine are built on an ethos that identifies healers’ calling, authority and effectiveness with their own initiatory illness experiences. The Asklepian religious cults of ancient Greece also drew from the image of the wounded-healer. This essay argues that ethos of the wounded-healer remains relevant to contemporary medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy. Developmental changes in the relationship of the healer to his wounds during psychiatric training are illustrated by a series of dreams. The ethos of the wounded-healer has implications for the training of clinicians, as well as for the ethics and pragmatics of clinical work.
