What sustains my praxis

What sustains my praxis: Brief reflections on sexuality, deathfulness, and what it means to be a healer…ⁱ

Sustainability is a contemporaneous notion that has burgeoned since the 1980s. It gained traction with the dawning awareness that our species — through industrial expansion, population explosion, and the current hegemony of transnational corporate capitalism — seems hellbent on homicidal and ecocidal destruction. Although humans seem always to have had a propensity for destructiveness, the globalization of our cultural and socioeconomic structures, accompanied by technological capacities of a previously unimaginable scale and sophistication, make likely future horrors of an unprecedented magnitude. In the ’80s, “sustainability” was articulated by prescient individuals aiming to rescue the planet or at least retard its devastation. Perhaps predictably, the term has been co‑opted by the corporate boardroom and beyond, where it comes to mean specifically the ongoing “development” of self‑interested economies; that is, the sustainability of accumulation, market expansion, and profitability. In short, sustainability has become a bit of a buzzword.

Now the LifeSherpa project invites us, as a diverse group of healers, to consider what sustains us personally. Serge Prengel’s editorial Foreword (to his What Sustains Me anthology) suggests this be considered in terms of a spiritual‑existential quest. Yet just as the personal cannot be separated from the political, I do not think that one can, or should, disarticulate anyone’s spiritual‑existential journey from its cultural and socioeconomic context.ⁱⁱ I will offer some further thoughts on this as I proceed, because I want to offer the idea that an absolutely essential foundation for each individual’s spiritual‑existential growth is our mindfulness of, and our effort to assuage, the violences that we all unavoidably commit — both directly and indirectly.

Allow me to begin this personal reflection on my life praxis with a few questions that I believe are pertinent. When interrogating what sustains me, we surely must ask: To which me are we referring. After all, we are all bundles of entwined versions of “me,” intrapsychic, interpersonal, societal and ecological — ugly as well as beautiful, nasty as well as nice, profane and yet sacred, perhaps even divine. Such bundles may, or may not, be well articulated or even partially integrated with each other. So we must surely also ask: Sustaining “me” for what and how? I do not wish to seem pedantic, but we might also consider the distinction between growth (as authentic development) versus the preservation or perpetuation of what has been developed (an inherently conservative perspective). That is, the sustaining of what is, as contrasted with the potentiality of what might become. In this short commentary, I will focus — as I anticipate is expected — on myself as healer. But here I am compelled to ask: What is healing?

In some of my writings, I have expressed vigorous opposition to criteria for healing being derived from implicit or explicit standards of sociocultural adaptation (or “adjustment”) and maturation. There is no way anyone is able to concoct a concept of adaptation that is ideologically neutral, as if decontextualizing the individual from his or her social, cultural and economic arrangements. Given the varying degrees of oppressiveness and alienation that characterize our global circumstances, such an enterprise of attempted conceptualization is inherently problematic (i.e., it is itself an ideological enterprise, justifying these circumstances).ⁱⁱⁱ Moreover, when we invoke the concept of “maturity,” we invariably refer, again implicitly or explicitly, to some ideal model that is ideologically circumscribed (and almost invariably one that is insufficiently examined).^iv As a radical psychoanalyst, I think we also need to be suspicious of thinking about healing that is grounded on ideals of personal unity, interior harmony, lack of inner conflict, or “self‑realization” and “actualization” (let alone “adjustment” to prevailing “realities”). If indeed, as demonstrated by classical psychoanalysis, the human condition is one in which how we represent and coordinate our various selves is invariably and unsurpassably in conflict or contradiction with the wellspring of our desires (and any assessment of these various selves is invariably and unsurpassably mired in ideology of some sort), then it can be an illusory goal to imagine that we, or anyone else, can come into a complete state of integration or that we might possible live without experiencing suffering (as much as I am some sort of Buddhist, I disavow the idealization of “Buddhahood” as some sort of fantastic ideal of complete or completed enlightenment).

I will return to this last point shortly, but it is, after all, the first truth taught by Gautama. Life is suffering (dukkha), which cannot be escaped by palliation or the pursuit of gratifications. In The Emergence of Somatic Psychology and Bodymind Therapy, I proposed that we need to rethink the notion of healing. We should not continue to confuse it: (i) With the avoidance of pain or with symptomatic relief; (ii) with the avoidance of death and, I have argued, with denial of the deathfulness that lies within every moment of our being‑in‑the‑world; or as I have just indicated (iii) with sociocultural adjustment and the prevailing norms of “maturity.” Instead I have advocated that we must rethink our ideas about healing in terms of three interlinked characteristics (all of which are contentious to varying degrees, given our current social, cultural and economic circumstances globally).

(i) Healing is holistic. One cannot heal one part of our being‑in‑the‑world, our lived experience, as if it were independent of all the other parts.

(ii) Healing involves the mobilization of subtle energies. One cannot heal by remaining static or by arriving at some sort of condition of stasis; whether one acknowledges and is aware that there are indeed subtle energies within us and all around us is thus crucial to whether “healing” is illusory or profoundly “real.”

(iii) Healing involves some sort of appreciative connectivity that touches all aspects of our being‑in‑the‑world with awareness. In previous writings (for example, Liberating Eros), I presented the significance of our appreciative awareness of connectivity — a profound spiritual sense of the interdependence of all beings, both in their creation and in their destruction.

So, in this context, I want to suggest that healing necessarily implies growth in freedom (as freeing), in truth (as truthfulness‑in‑process), and in compassion (again as an active quality, incorporating appreciation and grace).^v “Growth” here implies not progress toward some endstate or goal, but a perpetual reworking of and replaying with what is, directed at all the limitations and distortions endemic to the “is.” So perhaps a shorthand way of expressing this is to insist that: Healing is the process of freeing, of the unfolding of truthfulness and of growing into compassion. Note that, in this cryptic formula: “Freeing” is a verb, indicating an ongoing process, rather than a nominal achievement (“freedom”); “Truthfulness” is also an ongoing process (rather than a specifiable mode of correctness, such as “the truth”); “Growing into compassion” surely means that healing is Love (capitalized), but again this must immediately be qualified to indicate the notion of a universal vibration, which is to be distinguished from (lower case) love as the common idea of an affectionate (and not so affectionate) mode or bond of attachment. Compassion does not imply attachment or appropriation, but an active verb incorporating genuine empathy, appreciation and grace. These considerations — and my constant awareness of my shortcomings in relation to them — are, I believe, integral to what sustains me as a healer.

It is a familiar platitude that healing must begin with self‑healing. Not so familiar is the tenet that both awareness of the need for healing and the perpetual work and play of self‑healing (I favor the notion of a “workplay‑in‑process”) are essential to the healing capacities of the healer. Distinguishing between growth as the fluidity of development and the conservative preservation (perpetuation) of what has been attained (which often implies a rather unwholesomely self‑satisfied attitude), I am convinced that what has sustained me as a healer is my sense of myself as needing healing and becoming somewhat healed, as well as my ongoing awareness of my dire need for further healing. The notion of “self” in self‑healing is perhaps paradoxical, because, in a profound sense, one’s capacities to heal depend on the extent to which one is able to get one’s “self” out of the way of the process of healing. That is, my capacity to facilitate healing in others requires that I hold the gratifications of being me in abeyance as much as possible. To express this differently, the process of healing is egregiously circumscribed (i.e., limited) by the healer’s egotism or narcissism (e.g., the wish to feel that he or she is a “great healer” or even an “effective” one, and so forth). This point will be elaborated as I proceed. I do not wish to be immodest, but I think that one of the main forces that has sustained my workplay as a healer has been both the sense that I am myself growing spiritually or existentially (even if in fits and starts), and my acute awareness of my ongoing “pathology.” The former entails my ability to “let go” and not grasp for self‑gratification — and yet, of course, my egotism still remains the major limitation of my capacities as a healer.

I started life clearly in need of personal healing — a physically damaged baby, a mother with postpartum psychosis and subsequent depression, a father often physically as well as emotionally absent, a boys‑only elementary school that was emotionally as well as sexually abusive, and so on. Out of all this, I became involved in social justice issues even before puberty, and throughout adolescence I actively sought opportunities not only for political activism, but also for spiritual paths that would address my inner anguish.

Today I remain firmly, perhaps hopelessly, committed to some sort of decentered socialism (i.e., something other than the state‑controlled arrangements of the Twentieth Century’s communist experiments). In many indigenous — pre-colonial — cultures, this could be called ‘communalism’ (not to be confused with communism, which in every country allegedly under that affiliation turned into state-run capitalism). But writing now in 2016, I no longer imagine I know how to translate my convictions into any effective mode of collective action. The possibility of creating, on any significant scale, social, cultural and economic arrangements that are not fundamentally based on exploitation, accumulation and expansion, looks to me increasingly bleak. Although I am unclear how I came to this aspect of my socio‑spiritual or politico‑ethical commitments, I have known since a very young age that if one has more than enough of something that another person needs, one is engaged in a pernicious form of violence (and that the globalized social, cultural and economic structures that make this violence inevitable have urgently to be changed).

I also remain firmly committed to my dharma practice as a sort of “mix‑and‑match” Jewish‑Quaker‑Buddhist, more or less in a contemporized version of the Vajrayāna lineage (but without any of the traditional Tibetan adornments or allegiances, and still deeply skeptical of all organized religion). However, it was not until, aged twenty, when I experienced a depressive breakdown and was psychiatrically hospitalized for almost a year in an experimental institution, that I realized the profound possibilities of personalized healing in a secular context.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Cassel Hospital in London was, in the best sense of the term, an asylum (a refuge and a place for healing), which was entirely run on psychoanalytic lines. Although sponsored by the UK’s National Health Service (which was a blessing because, as a working‑class boy, I did not have the funds for private treatment), there were no medications, no electroshock, no behavioral or cognitive manipulations, and no bars on the windows. Rather, there were regular individual and group therapy sessions, as well as community meetings. Patients were at liberty to come and go; but, if able to do so, patients were expected to find a local job and make a financial contribution to the institution. I feel privileged to have been an inpatient there for almost a year; indeed, I do not know if I would have survived had I not received this privilege. The experience was eye‑opening and life‑changing.^vi Not only did my fantasies, my narratives and my feelings about myself, my family and my early life, shift radically, but my use of my intelligence and my imagination blossomed. Moreover, although this was solely a “talking cure,” my experience of my body opened. In relation to this last point, it is notable that I moved rapidly from being chronically constipated to having smooth and pleasurable bowel movements, and from having merely alleviative ejaculations to a far fuller orgasmicity. In short, I discovered the processes of suppression and repression within myself and consequently I started to reconnect with my “sexual body.” I left the Cassel Hospital determined to seek more healing (generally as well as psychoanalytically) and wishing to become a healer.

But even before my inpatient sojourn, there was a lesson I feel I learnt in high‑school, under the influence of the Quakers (the school was conveniently located and so, since my parents knew virtually nothing about Quakerism, my attendance was serendipitous): Spiritual practice dictates political awareness. Later in my teens, when I lived in India and studied the activism of those who diligently followed Mohandas Gandhi in trying to translate the principle of compassion or ahimsā into the here‑and‑now struggle for freedom and justice (e.g., Vinoba Bhave, JC Kumarappa, and Jayaprakash Narayan), I became yet more skeptical of spiritual paths that seem to be disengaged (and also of any “existentialist” position that is fundamentally bourgeois). We may have to begin with healing ourselves, but the practices of self‑healing cannot be dissociated from the implication of our actions for healing or hurting others, healing or hurting other populations across the globe, healing or hurting the health of the planet.

From my adolescence onward, I have rather consistently sought an alignment between the personal and the political. Sadly, what may be most tragically instructive about my individual journey is the extent to which I now realize that I have sought an alignment that is, at this point in human history, ultimately impossible — or, at most, only approximately possible. However, I still firmly believe such an alignment still needs to be sought. We need to strive to make our praxis of healing both personal and political (intrapsychic, interpersonal, as well as culturally and socioeconomically aware and activist); of course, most fundamentally, the personal is political, and vice versa.

After the Cassel Hospital and the completion of a few academic degrees, my career as a healer began formally in 1975 with the first very troubled patient I saw as an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Having earned a PhD in Psychology and Human Relations (as well as a PhD/DHS in Clinical and Educational Sexology), I now practice as a psychoanalyst, somatic psychologist and sexuality consultant. Thus I have workplayed as a healer for just over forty years. Finding many psychoanalytic institutions too exclusively “cerebral,” I have also trained, to varying degrees, in several forms of yoga, traditional sen‑sib massage (and other forms of “hands‑on” bodywork), subtle energy practices from several lineages, free‑dancing, tantric meditation, psychodrama, and consultative clinical psychology. In addition to two lengthy periods of personal psychoanalytic treatment at five sessions per week, which were unquestionably essential to my growth, I have benefited from workshops founded by the late Stan Dale, as well as from safely conducted experiments with certain hallucinogens. I frequently recall Osho’s injunction that everyone should practice at least two modes of meditation — heating and cooling — and I have followed his guidance. But I also now think that, at this juncture in our understanding of the crafts of healing, every healer should learn two modes of praxis — two that are significantly different from each other. How else are we to address the body/mind split still endemic to our North Atlantic cultures?

So what sustains me as a healer? In addition to — or more accurately, as an integral aspect of — my personal trajectory of self‑healing, I find I am grounded when meditating, when listening to patients, when lovemaking (sometimes), and when writing (when it flows from within), and when dancing (so long as I am not expected to do anything remotely choreographed). By “grounded” here, I mean when I feel a deep sense of both of things coming together and of myself coming apart in my interconnectedness with all that is “other” or “otherwise.”

I know that things can often seem to “come together” in moments that are utterly illusory — so what authentically does this mean? From my personal experience, I believe we can only discuss the spiritual and existential grounding of our being‑in‑the‑world (and the essentially concurrent sense of deconstructive dispersal, interconnectedness and ephemerality) in terms of three interrelated dimensions.^vii

• Our relations within our self (i.e., the psychodynamics of our bodymind), and how we conduct ourselves with others and with the planet. Here we cannot avoid the embeddedness of the personal within the political. If healing relationships entail compassion, it begins with nonviolence (ahimsā). Yet violence is unavoidable, even if we blind ourselves to this reality. So our spiritual and existential praxis must be mindful of the violences we inevitably commit.
• Our sexuality, by which I mean the eroticism of the subtle energies that pervade our embodied experience as well as the world around us. I suggest that it is only in the liberation of our erotic potentialities, our “lovemaking” (in a profound and specific as well as in a general sense), that freedom, truthfulness and compassion can be located. I have written about this quite extensively.
• Our deathfulness, by which I mean not merely our death as the endpoint of our life’s narrative, but the deathfulness that inheres to every moment of life, every movement of our being‑in‑the‑world.

I would like to amplify these reflections on what sustains me by offering a few comments on each of these dimensions.

About Relations. We must consider here the relations that I have within myself — between events that seem more bodily and those that seem more mental, between different versions of me — as well as the relationships I have with others and with the cultural and socioeconomic nexus I inhabit.

I am particularly grateful that my calling as a healer began with meditation and psychoanalysis, for the following reason. Although the latter has become, in the course of its history of just thirteen decades, too institutionally and theoretically ingrown, to the point of a certain sort of stagnation, there are central coordinates to psychoanalytic or psychodynamic thinking that should not be forgotten (but often are). As a generic categorization that encompasses the various strains of psychoanalysis (as well as other contemporary therapies), psychodynamics implies an understanding of the human condition that: (i) is non‑manipulatively interested in the meaning of life’s events for the participant; (ii) is holistic in what is fashionably called a “body, mind, spirit” sense, which implies that it does not subordinate the body to the mind, or vice versa, but has a “bodymind” perspective; and (iii) is clear and consistent in acknowledging the inherently and interminably contradictory, conflictual and contested, character of human events (which is, after all, what is essentially involved in Sigmund Freud’s classic discovery of the psychoanalytic method). That is, a psychodynamic approach recognizes the incessantly processive or “dynamic” character of the human condition. This third point is especially important, because we desperately want to believe that we are, or can become, whole in the sense of completely integrated, self‑unified, or internally harmonious. I emphasize this point because many of the therapies that developed after Freud’s revolutionary discoveries (including ones that call themselves “psychoanalytic”) have forgotten it and labor under a formalizing and immobilized ideology that posits spurious ideals of stasis as “truth” and of a “freedom” that is without conflict or contradiction. Against such ideology, I believe that healing requires us to understand that, however much therapy we undergo, processes of suppression and repression will still be active within us, and our reflective self‑consciousness will still have only a partial and distorted access to our embodied experience and to our desire (that Freud called Trieb or drive). Our erotic energies and our embodied desires will always be in a contradictorious relationship with our inner theater of representations and our socialization. Our human condition is forever dynamically fractured.

This brings me back to the relationship between the personal (the intrapsychic dynamics of our bodymind) and the political (our interpersonal, cultural and socioeconomic milieu). If healing essentially entails the operation of compassion, then perhaps we can agree that the antithesis of compassion is violence. At the very least, healing involves moves toward abstention from violence (and here I consider manipulative therapies to be a mode of violence). In this context, Slavoj Žižek’s characteristically provocative and polemical essay on this topic points incisively to the problem we all face (it does much else additionally, with which I am not concerned here). Žižek distinguishes the three “levels” of subjective (by which he more or less implies the intrapsychic dimension of violence in the internal relations of our bodymind), objective or interpersonal, and systemic violence. What is immediately and disturbingly evident is that to attempt to eradicate violence on one level almost unavoidably (perhaps I just mean unavoidably, without equivocation) perpetuates it on another level. In large measure, this occurs precisely because of the way our world is arranged socially, culturally and economically. Our awareness of this — our mindfulness of our participation in multiple levels of violence — and our earnest activism against such embroilment seem to me essential to our capacity to be healers and to what sustains us as healers.

My decision to become a healer of individuals, rather than an activist for a revolutionary movement that does not even exist, positions me today in untenable circumstances (as, I submit, it does for all of us). Just as participation as an activist might well have inadvertently caused harm on other levels, so too healing the intrapsychic and interpersonal levels typically entails the perpetuation of a malignant system on the cultural and socioeconomic level. Wittingly or unwittingly, those healers, who assume that the dominant order is a “reality” toward which healing adjusts each individual, “make the formation of the illusions of the ruling class about itself their chief source of livelihood” (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expressed it). To give a mundane example, for a healer not to be compensated for his or her labors is not only impossible in terms of the livelihood of the healer, but also sabotages the necessary interpersonal reciprocity of the healing process (philanthropy is rarely more than a gesture toward healing, most often it is an act of patronage that imprisons the recipient). Yet when we are compensated for our labors, we participate in a global economy that systematically impoverishes the “bottom billions.” Working as I do in Africa (to which I was invited to emigrate in order to teach psychodynamic and somatic modes of healing), I feel this acutely every day. When a trainee pays me for a session or when students pay me to teach a seminar, the modest funds that are circulated could well save the family in rags that sits on the next street corner from starvation or the ravages of disease; moreover, somewhere along the line, the reason the trainee or student enjoys those financial resources is precisely because of a business enterprise, the success of which depends on the “wage slavery” of poorly compensated employees.

To express this differently, fighting for freedom and justice usually traumatizes the individual who fights (in South Africa the wounds of apartheid are alive, although sometimes somewhat hidden, in the souls of the supposedly “born free” post‑apartheid generation, to say nothing of those who participated themselves in the struggle against the apartheid regime). But conversely, healing the individual — any individual, wounded in any way — involves activities that perpetuate some other population’s systemic wounding. So whereas I may establish nonviolence in the relationships that eventuate within my consulting room (and perhaps also, to some degree, within my circle of friends and family), I am still inevitably a bystander‑perpetrator of the violence that characterizes the social, cultural and economic levels.

In this context, perhaps the most that can be hoped of healing is that we become aware of the multiple modes of violence that we all unavoidably commit; rather than blinding ourselves to them in the belief that we can become what Georg Hegel sarcastically called a belle âme, a beautiful soul. Since we cannot avoid committing violence — intrapsychically, interpersonally, or systemically — the most significant issue is whether we can be mindful of the violences in which we are implicated in relation to those from which we manage to abstain. Despite our righteous striving for thorough‑going compassion, we are deluding ourselves if we believe we are ever able to live fully in ahimsā. Healing is not aided by any form of our denial of the violence within us, between us and, by implication, inherent in the world we inhabit.

About Sexuality. For obvious political reasons, many healers would prefer not to acknowledge the extent to which all healing is a matter of eroticism. Yet so many of us are aware that healing is neither just a matter of transforming physiological functions and anatomical mechanisms, nor just a matter of transforming the inner theater of our representations of self and others. Rather, healing involves the subtle energies that flow (and are so often blocked) through and within our bodymind, as well as circulating all around us. Psychoanalysis is much misunderstood (although perhaps for understandable reasons). When Freud discovered the suppression and repression (the ways in which our reflective self‑consciousness systematically distorts or precludes certain of our thoughts, feelings and wishes that are nonetheless active ingredients of our being‑in‑the‑world, our lived experience), he did not just discover that some of our representations or fantasies are suppressed into a preconscious or descriptively unconscious condition, from which they may therapeutically be returned to self‑consciousness. Far more radically, he discovered that repression decomposes representations into an actively impulsive but unrepresentable condition. Our lives are lived subjected to forces of desire that govern us from beyond the “repression barrier” — desire that always eludes, evades or exceeds the possibility of our translating it into representations that might be reflectively articulated within the purview of our self‑consciousness. What this implies is that our inner theater of representations of self and the “other” or “otherwise” is perpetually in a dynamic process of contradictoriness in relation to the energies of our desire. What is “in” the repressed unconscious is not representational, but a restless, persistent and insistent, momentum of free‑flowing subtle energies, which are often held within our embodied experience.

When Freud wrote of psychic energy or libido, as a force within our lived experience that is nonetheless always dynamically “at odds” with how we represent ourselves and others, was this not the westernized discovery of prāṇa (ch’i or qi)? There are differences between the traditional Asian doctrines and Freud’s discovery, but these need not concern us here. The point to be considered is that subtle energies flow throughout (and are often blocked within) our bodymind and do not take a detour around our loins (indeed, many wisdom traditions insist that such energy enters the bodymind foremost through the mūlādhāra, our coccygeal‑perineal‑genital root).

In my personal view, a diligent effort to be aware at all times of the energies of our bodymind is essential to the praxis of healing. There is no necessary implication here about the sexuality of the healer, if “sexuality” is taken to mean the performance of “sex acts.” The healer may be abstinent, unpartnered, exclusively or multiply partnered. That is not the point, but I do know from my own journey that my capacity to be a healer has grown with my increased awareness of my embodied erotic experience. And I know that one dimension of what sustains me as a healer is my ability to have a joyous relationship with my embodied energies, as well as those of partners. To be sensually alive seems to me necessary to the calling of a healer and I have become very skeptical of therapeutic practices that do not recognize the centrality of eroticism as the wellspring of our being‑in‑the‑world.

About Deathfulness. There is an interesting, but perhaps in today’s terms unremarkable, essay written in 1912 by Sabina Spielrein, who was the first genuinely feminist psychoanalyst.^viii It is a paper that she read to Freud and that considerably influenced his subsequent ideas about what I call the principles of lifefulness and deathfulness. Spielrein discusses the intimate and inescapable connection between what she labels as “destruction” and “creation.” She explores their impenetrable interdependence. In terms both more contemporary and more ancient (in their Buddhist articulation), this resonates with the doctrine of origination that intimates how fading is required for arising and how all that arises will fade away. Presences emerge from an all‑encompassing absence — a fecund void from which they emerge and then retire.

In my view, the principle of lifefulness (sometimes translated as Freud’s life‑drives or Lebenstriebe) concerns the way in which investments of desire, even when modified by our egotism’s defensive mechanisms, animate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That is, a principle of energetic movement that brings a (re)presentation into the present. Lifefulness accounts for the existence of the present. The principle of deathfulness (sometimes translated as Freud’s death‑drives or Todestriebe) concerns the way in which every moment of desire dissipates into the next moment, as if in an inexorably entropic imperative. That is, a principle of energetic movement by which all presences recede into absence. Deathfulness accounts for the way in which the life of the present is dependent on innumerable past‑futures that appear non‑existent (although this is entirely a matter of appearance).

Although these principles may seem metaphysically abstruse, there are three ways in which they seem to me to be profoundly significant for our understanding of healing and for the sustenance of the healer. First, deathfulness is not to be equated with destructiveness, in that the latter implies violence. Destruction is an aggressivized assault by one entity on another, both of which are present as energized. It is, in a sense, an assault on the inherent ebb and flow of libidinized investments and often to be understood as a resistance to deathfulness itself. By contradistinction, deathfulness is the inherent ebbing that occurs within every life‑filled moment of desire. Second, this inherent deathfulness of life itself is necessary for the liveliness or “creativity” of each new moment. In this sense, decomposition is integral to, and necessary for, composition and thus also for the recomposing process that we think of as healing. Thus, third, deathfulness is not to be resisted. Rather, healing implies that its participants embrace the inherently “necronautical” dimension of each life’s passage (I believe this term is Simon Critchley’s provocative neologism).

Here is, as I have experienced it, the essence of healing as a genuine awareness, not only of all our multiple modes of relatedness and of the erotic energies of our embodied experience, but also as an acceptance of this deathfulness that lies within and around every moment of our being‑in‑the‑world. It is only in this awareness that I feel things “come together” and my chattering mind recedes. Only in this sort of awareness does my egotism seems to dissolve and there arises a profound nonjudgmentalism. It is as if, in the awareness of the deathfulness of our being‑in‑the‑world, we find the truthfulness of Seng‑Ts’an’s poetic insistence that the primal disease of the chattering mind is the struggle between what one likes and what one dislikes, between the good and the bad. This insight also seems essential to the healing attitude.

When meditating, there is no right or wrong way to meditate, one is either in meditation or not. When workplaying in bodymind modalities of healing, one either follows the pulse of our energies, usually indicated by the breath, or one is out of the process of workplaying. When listening to patients in psychoanalysis, one either listens in a free‑associative reverie, or one is not listening but engaging either in one’s own pursuits or in frantic calculations allegedly undertaken on behalf of the patient. When lovemaking, there is no right or wrong way — except that one either abandons oneself to the authentic and spontaneous flow of sensual pleasure, or one does no more than stage an inauthentically imitative performance. When writing, the muse either comes or one mechanizes the production. And when dancing? No one can tell you how to dance because, as many wise people have said, your dance either comes from within or you are rendering yourself into a marionette.

Perhaps I might add one last line of thought. Late in his life, Freud famously attempted to define “health” and found that he could not. Misery may be healed, but unhappiness is unavoidable, both because we live in an unhappy world and because our bodymind is perpetually in dynamics of conflict or contradictoriness. He argued that all we can strive for, as perhaps the key to living happily with our unhappiness, is the capacity to love (lieben) and to work (arbeiten). But here lieben surely means living in the universal vibration of Love, rather than in the bonds of “love” as participation in attachments that are invariably compromised by hate. Arbeiten certainly does not imply the alienated labor of the miner, the employee on the factory line, or the worker who sits for eight hours daily in front of a computer, but rather something that arises from the wellsprings of our creativity. Although he was notoriously adept at jokes, Freud was — I suggest — far from a playful man. So it is one of the rare advances of our thinking about healing that has occurred since his pioneering honesty that many of us would add a third dimension, play (spielen). Here I do not mean soccer, poker, chess or bike‑riding. Rather, play is surely to be understood as the free‑flowing exercise of our capacity for whimsical adventure, spontaneity, and rejuvenation. It is the spiritual challenge of enjoyment; that is, of finding the joy in the mundanity of life. Healing is a process in Love — it is necessarily workplay. For me, meditating, listening, lovemaking, writing and dancing are my personal manifestations of such a process; they help me balance lieben, arbeiten and spielen. I suppose, if sustainability is the apt notion, then this is how I sustain myself, at least in so far as I am a healer.