You know how it is when you try to back out of a relationship - it keeps coming at you until you make peace with it. Diane Tegtmeier
Relationships that Heal: Skillful Practice within Nature's Web. Natural Ethics for Today's Health Practitioner. Diane Tegtmeier, October 2009. See below for how to buy.
If I were the kind of person who underlined 'aha' moments in books, my copy of this one would be thoroughly marked up. For Diane is taking me on a rewarding hike through a familiar and challenging terrain. Every step - every word - has the weight of experience behind it.
Although she has made this book very accessible to someone new to what she inclusively calls the 'helping profession', I think it is likely to speak most to those who have bravely battled their way through some of the slings-and-arrows of a few years in healing practice and in life.
Since bringing all her many skills to the water in the practice of aquatic bodywork is a central passion for Diane, there are numerous references to this particular healing modality. However, setting it in a wider context and collaboration as she does here, is especially effective.
Diane and her work had me at hello.
Last year, I met her at the poolside in the hot springs retreat where she lives and practices. I can still see her face and summon up the clarity of her words as she sat in the spring sunshine, briefing me about the extraordinary aquatic bodywork session I was about to take with her.
I knew right away that I was in the hands of a professional; but also of someone who'd be willing to co-adventure with me, even if the going got wild or tough and the territory seemingly uncharted. All these metaphors seem appropriate as I read in the present book of her love for the Earth's wilderness.
The second hello came when I read her invitation at the start of the book to join her on a 'new kind of inquiry into professional ethics', not the dos and don'ts of conventional codes or any other human-centered attempt to control or predict what is called for in each unique situation needing therapeutic care.
A model is helpful though, and Diane has found a viable and versatile one in the cell membrane. Drawing on observations of common patterns of relationship in nature and her own lived experiences in family, work and community, she demonstrates how this model can work quite naturally in practice.
Like me, she has grappled with the implications of a common concept and central challenge in our profession - that of 'boundaries'. When not wielded well, this can turn into a destructive power struggle between client and practitioner that may go either way - exacerbating suffering or damaging reputation.
The extremes of practitioners who stick conscientiously to the rules they have been taught, and those who unconsciously break them to serve their own wounded needs, are equally harmful. Healthy but rare is the highly developed awareness and responsiveness in a healer-practitioner that Diane is exploring here.
In the model of the cell, I suggest that this ideal requires a vitalized system that has not been overloaded with toxicity of any kind or subject to traumatic injury that compromises or disables healthy function. Fortunately, cells and relationships are remarkably resilient and do have a natural preference for a balanced vibrant state.
By using the phrase 'healing partners' to describe the relationship that is commonly called 'client and therapist', Diane is establishing another important dynamic. Even if it doesn't start that way, the dynamic state of balance that is needed for health is a two-way process of exchange.
Diane's definition of healing is a brilliant distillation of all this, worth posting where you can contemplate it often:
Last year, I met her at the poolside in the hot springs retreat where she lives and practices. I can still see her face and summon up the clarity of her words as she sat in the spring sunshine, briefing me about the extraordinary aquatic bodywork session I was about to take with her.
I knew right away that I was in the hands of a professional; but also of someone who'd be willing to co-adventure with me, even if the going got wild or tough and the territory seemingly uncharted. All these metaphors seem appropriate as I read in the present book of her love for the Earth's wilderness.
The second hello came when I read her invitation at the start of the book to join her on a 'new kind of inquiry into professional ethics', not the dos and don'ts of conventional codes or any other human-centered attempt to control or predict what is called for in each unique situation needing therapeutic care.
A model is helpful though, and Diane has found a viable and versatile one in the cell membrane. Drawing on observations of common patterns of relationship in nature and her own lived experiences in family, work and community, she demonstrates how this model can work quite naturally in practice.
Like me, she has grappled with the implications of a common concept and central challenge in our profession - that of 'boundaries'. When not wielded well, this can turn into a destructive power struggle between client and practitioner that may go either way - exacerbating suffering or damaging reputation.
The extremes of practitioners who stick conscientiously to the rules they have been taught, and those who unconsciously break them to serve their own wounded needs, are equally harmful. Healthy but rare is the highly developed awareness and responsiveness in a healer-practitioner that Diane is exploring here.
In the model of the cell, I suggest that this ideal requires a vitalized system that has not been overloaded with toxicity of any kind or subject to traumatic injury that compromises or disables healthy function. Fortunately, cells and relationships are remarkably resilient and do have a natural preference for a balanced vibrant state.
By using the phrase 'healing partners' to describe the relationship that is commonly called 'client and therapist', Diane is establishing another important dynamic. Even if it doesn't start that way, the dynamic state of balance that is needed for health is a two-way process of exchange.
Diane's definition of healing is a brilliant distillation of all this, worth posting where you can contemplate it often:
Healing is the collaborative, transformative process by which balance is restored as we become increasingly aware of our wholeness and interconnection with all life.
This reminds me of my yoga teacher Iyengar's admonition that to know how to do 'Mountain' pose well, was to master the entire practice. This pose, simply that of standing still as a mountain, requires the kind of dynamic balance, while still staying grounded, that I think Diane has set out to share here.
After introducing 6 cell membrane principles that provide her healing model in the first section of the book, she takes us firmly from model to healing practice. The co-creative reader is encouraged to adapt appropriately the basic 5-step process Diane uses to integrate the model into her practice.
Taking the concepts developed from her cell membrane model (containment, selective permeability, interspace, differentiation, connection to center, and oneness), she brings them to life in creating safe space, dealing with power and control issues, and navigating money, sex and dual relationships.
The openness with which Diane shares her mistakes, her risks and her successes in working with others, many of whom were courageously facing serious physical and/or psychological traumas, is a model in itself for the level of honest humility and true compassion that such healing work requires.
In conclusion: If you are a novice practitioner buy this book (link below) and please don't leave it on your shelf after you have read it once. For us all, it deserves to be a well-leafed and thoroughly underscored working manual. It would also make valuable reading for someone on the receiving end who wants to know what is possible in the best of healing partnership.
More about Diane Tegtmeier
Website
AquaticNet profile
Here is a direct link to further information, including reviews, on the buybooksontheweb site: Relationships that Heal. I'd like to invite you to read the book and to add your own thoughts and experiences as a practitioner or receiver of aquatic therapy for others to see below.
Other links on this blog referencing Diane Tegtmeier's work
Aquatic Bodywork and Trauma Healing
Deepening core awareness, Part 2
Pristine waters; murky depths
A path to aquatic ecstasy
See also this comment referencing Diane's book and her discussion of natural ethics (specifically re violence) in this post on my partner's blog The Sky is My Mirror: A dialogue about violence.
