While Learning
Accompanying someone is the art of looking in a way that allows a person to begin to see themselves again.
Even those who accompany others remain learners. These thoughts come from seminars, supervision and mentoring — from hours in which the accompanist is the one practising.
Sentences That Can Wait
After listening again to a seminar.
Some time ago I took out an old recording again: a seminar from November 2008, two teachers in conversation, an interpreter between them, a full room. I wanted to hear it once more – for reasons that had to do with a piece of work, and that ceased to matter within minutes. Because as I listened, something else happened.
I still know what I heard back then: procedures. Phrases I noted down, interventions I wanted to understand. I listened as someone who wants to learn – and that was not wrong. The recording is full of things to learn.
Now, listening again, the recording is the same. The same voices, the same laughter in the room. But other sentences step forward. One of the two teachers is asked something and does not answer – he remains with the question, lets it stand in the room, longer than would be polite. Back then this probably seemed to me a detour. Today I hear: that was not preparation for the work. That was the work.
And then there is a sentence, spoken in the middle of the conversation, almost in passing: Something is trying to wake up. It means whatever troubles, frightens or shames us: that within it there can be something that does not want to be fought but received. I must have heard this sentence back then; it is not in my old notes. It has waited eighteen years. What has changed is the one who listens – in between lie many hundreds of conversations and a book.
Perhaps that is how understanding works: some sentences come neither too early nor too late – it is we who are too early. They wait in recordings, in books, in the memory of a conversation, more patiently than any speaker ever could. You cannot force anyone to hear today what they will only be able to hear in years. But you can say a sentence so that it can wait.
Since then I sometimes think of this in conversations. Not everything I say has to arrive today. And I have not yet fully heard everything that has been said to me – some of it is probably still waiting. In me.
The recording is back on the shelf. Some day I will listen to it again. Which sentence will have its turn then, I do not know.
After listening again to: Stephen Gilligan & Matthias Varga von Kibéd, Pathways to Freedom – Wege zur Freiheit, seminar at the SySt® Institute, Munich, November 2008.
Upright
After an evening of voice training.
A hot evening, a room under the roof, fans brought from home. Voice training with the choir: we stand scattered around the room, sing five notes on O, raise our arms, feel for our shoulder blades. Then an experiment. First round: sing just as you are standing. Second round: stand upright – as though someone had said: Stand up straight! – and sing again.
I was certain how it would turn out. Upright is better; that is what we learned from parents, teachers, back-care courses. But the sound disagrees. The uprightness we make sounds brighter and more strained; the voices stand side by side without joining. The first round, by contrast – simply standing as you happen to stand – has ground. The voices blend. And at the same time, and this keeps the evening honest: not everyone in the room feels it that way. Some feel better upright – more present, more open. Both are allowed to stand; nobody is corrected.
Then the sentence of the evening: there is an uprightness – but it happens behind us, in the back, not at the front. The uprightness we make lifts the chest and tightens the face. The one we find begins where we cannot see ourselves. One exercise takes us deep down, almost into a crouch, ancient and unceremonious – and then, slowly, vertebra by vertebra, up again. At the end you are standing upright without having made yourself upright.
In passing, a second sentence falls, during an exercise on balance: as long as the body fears falling, it refuses the deep breath. Only when nothing more can happen does it breathe. The sentence was about balance. It reaches further.
On the way home I think about the word stance, which we use for conversations as well. Perhaps the same is true there. A stance you decide on – appearing attentive, appearing calm, appearing professional – produces exactly the peaks that blend with no one. One that comes from behind, from whatever has raised you up, has nothing to display. You do not hear the difference in the words. You hear it in the ground beneath them.
At the end of the evening we sing once more, a summer song in a hot room. No one is standing straight any more. But everyone upright.
The Third Question
Listening further to a seminar.
I have gone on listening to the seminar from back then. This time I was caught by a question that comes after an exercise, in passing, almost at the end: What little thing do you want to bless?
I know the questions that usually come at such moments. What do you want to improve? What do you want to change? They are the questions of our age; whole bookshops live off them, and they are not wrong. But nobody asks the third question. Bless – the word comes from another world, from churches, from grandmothers, from the end of old letters. And now it stands in the middle of a seminar, put to people who have just been working quietly side by side.
The difference is greater than it sounds. Whoever wants to improve has seen a deficiency. Whoever wants to change has judged something wrong. Whoever blesses leaves something as it is – and comes to stand beside it all the same. And in the seminar this is not about what is great and accomplished. It is expressly about something small: a spark that may be allowed to become a fire. What is blessed is not what is finished. What is blessed is what begins.
Since then I sometimes hear, in conversations, how much improving and changing there is in them – on my side. That too has its place; people call because something is meant to become different. But every now and then there is this moment when a person tells you something about themselves, quite in passing, something small and unfinished – and the fitting reply would not be a question about further and better. The fitting reply would be: Don’t let anyone take that from you.
I have tried the question on myself a few times since. There is plenty I could improve, plenty I could change; those lists write themselves. But bless? I have not yet found an answer. It is the first question in a long time where that does not trouble me.
Listening further to: Stephen Gilligan & Matthias Varga von Kibéd, Pathways to Freedom – Wege zur Freiheit, seminar at the SySt® Institute, Munich, November 2008.
Colours in the Dark
At a supervision session.
A hot evening in July. We meet for supervision; indoors it is cooler than outside; on the table, glasses of water. The supervisor is just back from her holiday and says she has brought us something: colours. Then she invites us to arrive with around. Each of us is to say what inner colours we are sitting here with today.
No one could have prepared for that. Yet one after another starts to speak. Skies come up, a water, a blue. No one says: fine. Everyone says colours.
When the round comes to me, I tell them about my day at my desk – and about how, again and again, I drifted out into our small garden. I sowed a flower meadow there, and now everything is in bloom, all at once: poppy red, yellow, white, lilac. Bumblebees fly about in it, a small spider, a grasshopper.
Later this evening it will be about the things we have come for. Before that, there is this round. It does not ask what we want to discuss. It asks what is already there.
No one arrives empty. Whoever arrives brings something with them, often without knowing it themselves – until someone asks. I had not known that the flower meadow had been with me all day. I knew it the moment I spoke of it.
Since then I sometimes wonder what someone is already sitting there with, before they say what they have come for. Mostly, I do not know.
When I came home later, it was dark. Of the flower meadow, only a shadow could still be made out. But I knew what colours stood there.
Read with the Eyes
After a poem.
There are recordings of a seminar I attended many years ago. Sometimes I put them on again. Somewhere on them, my teacher reads a poem aloud, a poem about kindness.
Being read to is not the same as reading for yourself. When you read for yourself, you set the pace, can go back, can skip a line that comes too close. When you are read to, you can only follow. The ears cannot turn back the page.
And something else is different: someone chose this poem – for that day, for those sitting in the seminar. He lends it his voice and his time. The poem spoke of kindness. While he read, it was no longer only in the lines.
Perhaps a poem about kindness is only whole when someone reads it aloud to someone else.
Later I went looking for the poem. I read it with my eyes. It is all there. Only someone is missing.
Prompted by: Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995) – read aloud by Stephen Gilligan at the seminar Pathways to Freedom – Wege zur Freiheit, SySt® Institute, Munich, November 2008.
A Friendly Greeting
After a mentoring session.
I am accompanying a colleague in his work on the telephone. Before each shift we talk, and I ask what has lingered from last time.
This time he tells me about a resistance. The kind of listening we are working towards – free of intention, without the urge to help at once – makes sense to him. But it costs him strength. Behind his calm, he says, there often lies an unease. And the more firmly he resolves to do nothing, the more something keeps working in him.
He knows this from before, from practices in which others find calm. They made him narrower, not wider. The greater the effort to relax, the greater the tightness.
I suggest something else to him: not to fight the unease and not to conceal it – to see it coming, give it a friendly greeting, let it move on.
Then the shift begins. Of the conversations I tell nothing; they are not mine. But of him I may say this: he had feared that allowing it would make everything worse. What he experienced was the opposite.
Perhaps it is as simple and as hard as this: Calm is not the absence of unease. Calm is when the unease no longer has an opponent.
Afterwards he says that, for the first time, sentences he had long known only from books have come alive.
At the next session I ask again what has lingered.