Transforming Lives through Dealing with Adversity, Trauma and the Unexpected: Life Challenges

Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Life Challenge as a Mythic Journey

Transforming Lives through Dealing with Adversity, Trauma and the Unexpected An Interview with Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D., author of "Crossings: Everyday People, Unexpected Events and Life-Affirming Change" (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York). By Alissa M. Lukara

Crossings is a literal life raft for anyone dealing with a life challenge, adversity, trauma or otherwise having an encounter with the unexpected. It shows how people open themselves to unimagined possibilities and create rich meaning out of passages that often completely change their lives. In the book, Richard Heckler charts the six stages of personal and spiritual transformation. These stages provide a map to help navigate adversity, trauma and all forms of life's challenges:

The Slumber
The Call
The Incubation
The Search for Meaning
The Leap
The Integration

It is these stages and the potential which lies within each one that Heckler discusses in the interview which follows.

HOW CROSSINGS CAME INTO BEING

ALISSA: I'd like to start by having you talk generally about the idea for Crossings and how you decided to do this particular book, which is so pertinent to anyone dealing with trauma and adversity.

RICHARD: My greatest passion as a therapist and as a spiritual practitioner has always been the transformative moments and how they occur. Attempting to distill all the particulars of the stories, all the details that are individual to various people I interview and see if there is a common structure underneath. I've done a number of pieces of research and, whether consciously or not, I seem to be most drawn to the pivot points in people's lives. Most often, of course, they do occur in times of great stress, life challenges, suffering, mostly in the form of loss. But certainly there are others as well, more epiphanies, kind of grand celestial or peak kind of experiences that people have. I wanted to study that formally, for Crossings.

I traveled around the country. Whenever I was giving talks or seminars or teaching, I would put out the word in advance and would interview people who had experiences of the unexpected kind, and who, based on those experiences, fundamentally changed their lives.

DISCOVERING THE SIX STAGES

ALISSA: You mention six stages that people who experience the unexpected go through, often while they are in the throes of dealing with adversity and trauma. Could you talk about how you arrived at these particular stages?

RICHARD: After seeing clients for twenty-five years and being involved in spiritual practice, I'd heard quite a number of stories. It always seemed to me there was one piece that was missing in the stories. The piece that was evident was that something unexpected, often quite dramatic, happened, and usually, in the short form of the story, it changed their lives. It's a very passively oriented story: God came down, hit you on the head, and your life changed.

Yet, I knew from the deep psychotherapeutic work, that happens for people, that there's a lot of active and proactive voices that respond in certain ways and make meaning of life. This active component didn't get recognized very much, however. I wanted to explore in these six stages, The Slumber, The Call, The Incubation, The Search for Meaning, The Leap and The Integration, both the active and passive component of these. The actual happening, the Call that takes you out of Slumber, nobody can control. You can't time it. You can't prepare for it. It just happens. But the other phases are about an active response to what's happened.

We begin with a kind of baseline to our lives; we live our lives in a certain fashion. This is what spiritual materials, perennial wisdoms and psychological theories and texts call the "trance of our everyday life." I found that to be a compelling phrase because a trance really means a narrowing of attention on a few selected realities; in a way, we tunnel in. It's like commuters who have to get to work on time. They're not necessarily looking at the flowers on the side of the road. They're looking at the traffic in front of them. Or somebody studying for a test- they're not thinking about the dinner that they're eating right then, but wolfing it down while they're reading the material. Doing this is very functional and it works, so we truthfully go in and out of trances many times during the day.

ALISSA: But people don't see themselves as living in a trance...

RICHARD: It has a way of generalizing as a lifestyle, and it's reinforced in its usefulness individually and familiarly and culturally. So over time, we lose the sense that we actually are in a trance. There is the capacity for waking up within that trance. The six stages evolved from listening to the stories about waking up. I didn't go in with a preconceived notion what they should look like, what they should be named, what follows what. Oftentimes the interviews would be 3-4 hours long to start with, with a number of follow-ups over the telephone afterwards. We ended up laughing and crying and being amazed and, oftentimes, lost in a sense of time and place in the story. So it was very rich. And I also felt in some way we were participating in this great tradition, the great oral tradition, that's been passed, where the great stories were passed down about life's lessons from person to person.

ALISSA: That really came across to me in the book. There's a tremendous amount of heart and spirit and mind, an honoring both of what people do and the mystery of life that is very profound.

RICHARD: After getting all of these interviews, I would look for what were the commonalties among them. What emerged was the six stages. I noticed that these stages had been referred to in other disciplines in earlier times. For example, Arnold van Gennep, a path breaking anthropologist, formulated this whole passage as a three stage model and really influenced the course of anthropology and participatory anthropology. He identifies the three stages as: Separation, Transition and Incorporation, where people have something happen, separate themselves from the community, go through something deeply, then come back out. While I flesh my model out more, both are very much in the same spirit, which is both comforting and intriguing, because as a therapist, I feel more like an anthropologist than a clinician in many ways. I am trying to discover some things about this culture that the person undergoing a passage brings in and how the culture contributes to whatever suffering they have.

THE SIX STAGES:

SLUMBER

ALISSA: So let's talk about the Slumber.

RICHARD: The trance of the everyday life was the first thing. I discovered that for some people, it was a chronic depression. For some it was a ferocious, cold, drug-induced sociopathy. For others, their life was actually going quite well. The Slumber is like the backdrop; it's what you see at the theatre before everybody comes on stage. And it's on that stage that the entrance of the unexpected presents itself and occurs.

THE CALL

ALISSA: Which is the next stage, the Call.

RICHARD: I chose to use the metaphor of lightning to describe the stage of the Call, because as people talked about it, it really did seem striking and impersonal, in the same way as lightning. Lightning crashes through the roof of your house, or breaks your windows. It doesn't matter if you live in a shanty or a mansion. This bolt that comes into your life is both striking and alarming, and it leaves the entire landscape changed-as we find out, irrevocably.

So the entrance of the unexpected is the second stage. For some people it was a near death experience or surviving a car accident they never should have survived. Some had a transportive kind of experience like Catherine, a woman who worked for the army as a top counter intelligence officer. A friend suggested she ask God for help with some problems she was having. Laying on her bunk at a military base, not even knowing if she believed in God, Catherine suddenly felt transported out of her body. She met a Christ-like figure who took her up to the top of a hill and showed her the lights of a beautiful city, where she knew beings were engaged in purposeful activity. The meaning of this was not clear at the time, but its effect was so compelling that she tried to make sense of it, for a long time afterwards. This was quite a contrast to the environment of top-secret counterintelligence.

For Christopher, the Call was quite subtle; a scene of church lit up with a cross against the evening sky in California, a recognition that for the first time he was experiencing a dialogue with a force larger than himself, then, later, hearing a voice that said, "Don't you ever worry about tomorrow."

For Tara, the call was quite dramatic. First, she had a near death experience. Then, a Native American man suddenly appeared out of nowhere in her living room, while she was cleaning and told her she would be with him in Taos by the end of the year.

Whatever these situations were, one thing they had in common was that they were just impossible to ignore-as were the fundamental life changes that people experienced afterwards. In many of the examples, there was something very alien about the entrance of the unexpected, but there was also something very intimate. The unexpected seemed to speak in a special code, a very special, personal code.

For Brook, a concert flutist feeling disconnected from her music and experiencing the death of her marriage, the experience spoke to her in terms of music. She actually saw a musical staff floating in the air, and the sense of knowing that she received didn't come from a voice, but from the music itself, which had always spoken to her. For Tara, it was the appearance of the Native American man. He wasn't European or Chinese, but Native American, and although she wasn't thinking about it at the time, this event directly referred to and served the purpose of bringing her back into her native American tradition.

A Process of Separation

ALISSA: What happened after the unexpected entered people's lives?

RICHARD: That was even more fascinating. The entrance of the unexpected seemed to shunt people into a period of separation regardless of whether they wanted it or not, regardless of whether they understood what was happening or not. Something about their world was fundamentally different. Their relationship to all the objects in that world seemed suspended for a while, so that the things that they would do for pleasure, didn't seem that pleasurable any more. Certain levels of conversation no longer felt satisfying.

What compounded the challenge is that many times, the people who had these experiences had difficulty describing them to their friends, loved ones and community. This period was really a precursor, a preface, and indicator that a change in their community was afoot, that something was ending and something new would begin somewhere down the line. Here in the middle, however, the space was highly ambiguous, but also very symbolically rich.

When the unexpected enters people's lives, there's no rule book, no guide book, no map, so people follow what they think are subtle clues or hints or signs. Separation is a very internal, introspective phase during which people pass through the next two stages of the process of transformation:

INCUBATION

During incubation, something is dying out and something else is getting ready to be born, but it's not born yet. Oftentimes, what's dying out is old ways of being. It is very similar to what people write about when they talk about the major life transitions, like the astrological event known as the Saturn return when comes when somebody is 28 or like what people call the midlife crisis or the midlife transition. All the ways you have put together your life-you may have even been doing quite well in a lot of ways-just don't seem to be as useful, functional or meaningful anymore and you just can't get it up to do it again. This is fine, but you also don't have anything new or different to substitute for those ways yet.

Because of this, Incubation is intensely vexing and painful, and people feel tremendously lost. This is what St. John discussed when he wrote about the "dark night of the soul", also known as the "night thief witch" in mythology. In this place, we have a sense that this is where we need to be, but it doesn't feel very good. We know that there may be great potential here, that life is moving at its own pace and the new will unfold in its own time. The question is what do we do in the meantime?

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

The second stage that's going on during separation is a fervent search for meaning. This is where people ask: Why did this happen? What does it mean? What does it mean in terms of my life? What does it mean in the context of this world and this universe that such a thing that I never expected to happen could have happened? Most of the people I interviewed weren't new age people living from out-of-body experience to out-of-body experience. They never expected something like this to happen to them and many of them never knew anything about these types of occurrences in the first place.

From the outside, the intense search for meaning that occurs could look obsessive, but from the inside, people feel it as the absolute right place to be right now-even if they have to let go of relationships or jobs or where they live or money or whatever else they need to let go of. This search becomes the quest of life. This is the great quest.

A Mythic Journey

ALISSA: It's like what Joseph Campbell refers to as the hero's journey.

RICHARD: All the legends throughout time and across cultures have written about when people go off in some way like the wanderer or the traveler or the hermit or the monk. In western culture, we're at somewhat of a disadvantage at this point, because in indigenous cultures, they're so familiar with these stages that they prescribe them. They take a novice, a young girl or boy, along with the other adolescents, away from their hut, from their family. Then, for a period of years or months, they're trained in the esoteric ways of the culture or community. They learn the names of all their ancestors. They learn how to find medicinal plants. They learn spiritual practices. They learn how to survive in the woods or the desert and spend the night alone. Many things develop, but they are also giving a sense of structure to this period. In this culture, we don't have this sense of structure.

ALISSA: No, in fact everything works against us having it.

RICHARD: We live in a culture that prizes achievement, accumulation, success and then holding on to all of that. As a result, when the unexpected comes, as it often does, in the form of loss or sudden turnabouts, we quickly interpret the events as meaning something is wrong. The culture further reinforces this idea when mental care givers throw diagnostic labels at this transition and further pathologize it.

One of the great lessons in the separation phase is that just because all of this is happening doesn't mean that something is wrong. Instead, something is being born. I attempt to instruct the students and therapists at the universities where I teach to remember this: The huge diagnostic label that they carry with them to their graduation is actually very small in scale compared to the nature and scope of this passage.

ALISSA: Absolutely, I wholeheartedly agree.

RICHARD: However, just because we don't have a structure-just because we don't have rituals and passages for our young people and our culture marginalizes our elders rather than looks to them to pass on this structure-doesn't mean that we don't go bumbling through this passage anyway. We do. And it's oftentimes inelegant and awkward. It's challenging and frustrating. Since there's no test of how long it's going to take, some people are in it for months and some are in it for years. I met some people who've been in this phase for 20 or 30 years. It's almost as if they are swirling in an eddy that got stuck in this phase. This passage is not meant to be a lifestyle, but I think that when there's an absence of information and certainly when this phase is pathologized, people can get stuck here for quite some time. So that's the separation phase.

The Incubation says there's something growing inside, something new is coming. The very first sign of meaning. Then, at some point, during the Search for Meaning, people do get a sense of what happened to them. What I think they notice more than anything else is that during this process, the baseline of their life-their interests, their values, what they're inspired by-has shifted. Oftentimes, this is when people find spiritual practice.

Overall, however, they find that something has changed. Now, they either feel ready to make some decisions based on the new baseline or some decisions come down the pike which need to be made-about friends, loved ones, family, relationships, jobs, geography. What they discover is that they're making them from a different point of view.

THE LEAP

ALISSA: These decisions and the subsequent actions people take are what you call the Leap.

RICHARD: People still might not even be able to explain their decisions so easily to others and from the outside the decisions may look quite inadvisable. Other people might even ask, "How can you do such a thing?" From the inside, however, what they're doing feels absolutely right-that this is the next extension. Some people move from the cities to the country or from east to west. Some people leave relationships, and others decide to be in relationships for reasons that they had never entertained.

For example, Rebecca went sailing with three young men and, as a result of a storm, their boat capsized. They were lost at sea for many days, during which time they experienced many trials and did not know if they would survive.

Just before this sea journey, Rebecca had been on a three month meditation retreat and what she learned there helped her navigate the terror and other deep emotions that surfaced while lost. Meditation practice helped her experience times where she was calmer and more self-possessed, even in the midst of danger. adventure, and lived through storms and many other trials. When they returned, the other three men remained quite traumatized, but she didn't feel the affects of being lost at all. Her meditation practice, staying mindful and aware and in the present moment, had pulled her through. She decided then and there that anything she did, any decision she made would be based around the fostering and supporting of her meditation practice. Her decisions about family, husband, work, all had to accommodate her essential purpose, which was that she would deepen her spiritual understanding.

I think that pretty much everyone I interviewed experienced something like that. A Leap. It's interesting though, the Leap doesn't really feel like a leap from the inside. No one had a really good word for what it felt like from the inside, because in some ways, that Leap may not even be that big a deal from the inside perspective. It's just the next step. But, from the outside, it looks like a leap.

I don't know if you remember the last Indiana Jones movie with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery. Indiana Jones gets to this canyon and he has this old tattered map and it says that you need to put your foot out over the edge of this cliff and step off.

ALISSA: That's a great scene.

RICHARD: You remember it?

ALISSA: It's the only scene from the movie that I do remember. To me, it's one of the memorable scenes of all time.

RICHARD: And it must have had every viewer in the theater watching at that point. Ford and Connery couldn't just put their little toe in as a test. They had to put all their weight on their foot as they stepped off the edge of that cliff onto nothingness, blank air. They had to trust, and then suddenly, when they stepped, instead of falling hundreds of feet down a sheer precipice, they discovered this bridge that was there all the time-only it was invisible. So, that's the Leap that people make, although from the inside, it doesn't always feel that way, that dramatic. It often just feels like the next logical thing to do.

During the Leap, people begin to make decisions from a different place than before. They find themselves creating a new structure to their lives. Much of what they learned in the separation phase is brought to bear.

THE INTEGRATION

What's interesting is that when people make this kind of passage, they don't come out of it saying "I'm going to rededicate myself to expanding my money market portfolio." They're much more interested in spiritual phenomena, spiritual practice. I found a progression that people went through, which I didn't write about in the book so much, but conceptualized afterwards. In this progression, their primary motivation in the beginning of the separation phase is fear. They don't know what happened and the motivation to find out is huge. At some point the fear seems to dissipate and their motivation goes from fear-driven to curiosity-driven. Then, by the end of this passage, in the Integration phase, their motivation for the kinds of things they do often becomes generosity-based. People feel like they want to give back something of what they learned. It's this wholehearted, full-bodied passage.

Tara ended up being a director of an international program for troubled adolescents, offering both indigenous teachings and wilderness experiences. It became so successful, there are branches all over the world. So she got to be out on the land, she got to practice Native American practices and she also got to use a considerable administrative skill that she discovered over the years.

Christopher became a minister, but really didn't experience much freedom and satisfaction in the confines of the traditional church, so he began to take his ministry into the community. He did a lot of work with AIDS patients in San Jose creating rituals of thankfulness for people suffering from AIDS. Thousands and thousands of people came. He also developed a foundation that helped channel money to poor communities and to people in those communities who had an idea of what would really be helpful from the inside. So there are many people, who in small ways and big ways, and in institutional and non-institutional ways, felt that their life work, at least in part, had something to do with giving back.

ALISSA: I can see that.

THE CYCLE STARTS AGAIN

RICHARD: Then I think what we found is that the cycle starts again. This new world, this new reality, this new set of values, becomes the background again. It's a much richer, much deeper, and much less routinized background than the one before. However, it doesn't stop there. People describe going through the cycle of stages a number of times. Oftentimes, they say that the unexpected becomes less dramatic. The signs they seem to need are more subtle, and they become more accustomed to the unusual happening-less thrown by it. When it happens now, it's no big deal. They just kind of search around and see what it might mean. What they're really describing is developing a working relationship with the unexpected, which was the working title of the book: "Developing a working relationship with the unexpected"-before Crossings became the main title.

I think developing a working relationship with the unexpected is very similar to what spiritual teachers have talked about when they talk about practicing dying. You practice exploring the experience of having to let go or having to surrender and finding something underneath that's deeper and richer and more enduring than whatever it was that you were holding on to. And it's not a one shot deal; it's something that we end up doing over and over again throughout our lives.

ALISSA: Absolutely. Can you talk more about that? Personally, it's one of the challenges I've encountered when faced with an unexpected adversity or trauma-to allow, to really be able to surrender to that.

RICHARD: For the people that I interviewed, I think all of them were complete novices when the first event happened. It really was an initiation. And they were as ungraceful and inelegant in their response as anyone could be. It was really trial and error. The ones that had a touch more perspective felt that their lives were a little bit like scratch paper, and they would experiment. But they all felt from the experience of the unexpected that they were buoyed or connected to, or were part of something that was much larger and much more meaningful. From that, they could derive at least a smidgen of confidence, so that when they could see themselves holding onto the past-because that's what first happened-whether it was holding onto a job, a relationship, some way of viewing the world, some habit or some addiction, whatever they held onto, they could begin the process of experimenting and letting go based on the faith that there was something underneath.

I think in Pali in the ancient Teravadin language, the word for faith is sada. It's actually poorly translated in English to faith, but what sada means is to place your heart upon, like you're placing your heart on an altar, or you're placing your heart on something that you are endeavoring to trust. And people learn from their first adventures through the passage, that it's actually safe to let go. They also find that it's sort of habit forming after a while. As they get more proficient and develop more life experiences, the practice of letting go in the face of difficulty shows itself as being so much more ecological. It's just enormously ecological. It is in relationship, because it causes less tension. It is in tune with our resources because it causes less hoarding. It develops a state of mind that is much more compassionate, because we know the suffering that comes from holding on, and gripping ourselves. When we know that and we begin to have experiences of that, it's ok to let go. Then we can help others to do that, too. You could very easily classify most of the suffering in the world as coming from an unwillingness to let go.

ALISSA: Which also includes not just letting go of things or people or attitudes, but just letting go of your own control.

RICHARD: Yes, your own sense of control. Finally giving it up.

ALISSA: In fact, what I've personally found is that, when I get to that place of just letting go and turning it over to a higher power, what emerges from that is so much richer, so much more aligned and often has no bearing on what I rationally thought could or should happen.

RICHARD: At least from the perspective that we had before the passage.

ALISSA: Right, what turns out is in a sense the most rational outcome.

RICHARD: It really turns out to be the most rational and the most reasonable from the perspective of having gone through the passage.

" IF YOU FIND YOURSELF FALLING, JUMP"-EXPLORING THE UNEXPECTED

ALISSA: I really look at life as one big lesson at this moment in time and the whole concept of searching for meaning in something really takes you out of the role of being the victim when dealing with adversity and trauma and let's you gain perspective and the learning from it. I wondered if you could talk about that-the difference between going through a life challenge and growing from it or becoming embittered by it...how can we consciously make that choice?

RICHARD: It's certainly an excellent question. Carl Jung once said that, "If you find yourself falling, jump." The people I interviewed who found themselves falling into this separation phase jumped-even though there was fear. They used it to explore as deeply as they could who they were, what their relationship to the earth was, what their relationship to others was, what their relationship to spirituality was and what this might have meant. For those people who embarked on that kind of quest, which is so rich, so unconventional, so fantastic and rewarding in its own right, bitterness never became part of the mix. There was grief. Yes. Sadness- you bet. There was anger sometimes-yes-and frustration. But the victimization that bitterness represents wasn't there, because they took an active part in what was happening. Even when people who experienced catastrophe responded in this way, they unearthed resources that they never knew they had to continue to cope, while coping was necessary, and they really began to put the pieces of that experience together into a fuller and richer life. They also found themselves markedly changed by all that.

I also talked to people who didn't question in this way. There were a lot of people who had experiences that were pretty amazing, certainly as dramatic as the ones in the book, and they didn't give it much thought. I remember one woman who was suffering from chronic and fairly debilitating back pain for a decade or so. She went on a self-pilgrimage to Pyramid Lake which is outside of Reno. It's on old Native American land and is spoken about in reverential tones. She had an experience there and her back pain completely left. She drove the 11 hours back home and was still fine, but she never gave it much thought. Within 3 or 4 months, the back pain came back, and she looked at what happened as just an interesting experience in her life, like a good meal. She didn't think about more than that, and I think that's the critical difference. When people really begin to really investigate what happens, the investigation-which isn't academic-is propelled by something that arrested their world, changed their life. In the middle of an adventure, people don't stop that long for self pity and bitterness.

A MODEL FOR THE UNCONSCIOUS OR A USEFUL FRAMEWORK?

ALISSA: You spoke about wake up calls repeating, but coming less intense. Do you think they're dramatic when there's something you really very much need to learn in your life, but you're not looking at it?

RICHARD: It would certainly fit nicely in a model. To the degree that we're really tightly holding on or that there's something about which we're particularly unconscious or dense, this unexpected comes in a stronger fashion to jolt us out of it. Certainly Jung felt that way. Jung felt that the unconscious in a person had a compensatory function. So, to the degree that individuals had become overly ego-invested in a particular way of being-maybe they were a rich, extroverted, power broker type of person-he would expect that some time in their lives they would be upended in the service of growing into being a whole person.

However, you can't really relegate everything that happened to the people in my book to being products of the unconscious. It doesn't fit. So this question that you asked is really about second guessing nature, and I don't know about that. The truth is that we don't know. But people report, somewhat in hindsight, that when they felt really stuck in their lives and the unexpected happened, it certainly bumped them out.

ALISSA: It is certainly one way.

RICHARD: It is certainly a viable world belief. It's not clear that is exactly what happens, but it's certainly even more than viable. It seems to apply to a lot of people. And I find in working with people it's a very useful frame, so that when the unexpected happens to them in the form of emotional and psychological distress, we can look at this as just another entrance of the unexpected rather than a confirmation of someone's sickness.

It's a very different way of looking at it. Then we're talking about what is this depression is saying? What kind of message is it bringing? I've worked with people who have panic attacks and anxiety disorders, and the traditional way of working with them is trying to ameliorate the panic and using biofeedback-like approaches. They're all very good, but they don't necessarily focus on the possible meaning of it. I think situations like that are a strong call from somewhere-whether deep in the unconscious or someplace out in the cosmic records-I don't know. They're a very deep call for change. Having that kind of frame becomes very helpful because it focuses on your future, rather than some sense that this has happened to you because of your past, because the past is evidently something that we can't change.

NEW AGE GUILT

ALISSA: Also, could you speak about the whole new age concept that if you're really thinking right...

RICHARD: ...you'll create your own world.

ALISSA: Right. And clearly there is free will in the world, but that kind of feeds that whole notion, that if something unexpected happens in your life, particularly if it has a negative connotation to it, that you've essentially blown it.

RICHARD: It's very limited thinking.

ALISSA: I think so.

RICHARD: It's what we ended up with, by the mid 80's when a lot of us were more fed up with some of the simplistic thinking we call the new age guilt. It's very similar to the concept of sin-this idea that "I wasn't pure enough in my thinking, I didn't do enough affirmations, I wasn't positive enough and this is what happens." We simply don't know that. I think that in any model of what happens to us, there has to be a kind of "x" factor represented by the question mark. Who knows? We really don't know. Many of the great spiritual seekers and teachers have urged us to cultivate something called the "don't-know" mind. I think that's because when faced with something ambiguous and certainly when faced with the unexpected, there's part of us that wants to depotentiate it. If we can create some phrases or words or sound bites, that would help us put it in a box. Then it's not so powerful and its not so uncontrollable. We've decided it's a mid-life crisis or that kind of thing. It's very thin thinking from my point of view.

GQ--THE GENEROSITY QUOTIENT

ALISSA: On that note, we're coming to the end of our interview time, Richard. Do you have anything you want to say in conclusion?

RICHARD: I guess I do. Buddha once said that if you could see, if you could know what I know, if you could know how impactful on life it is to organize your life around generosity, you would give everything you have every moment of the day. And this wasn't just a prescription for being a good person.

After having done all of this research and seeing this very broad transition that people made from being fear based to curiosity based to generosity based, time after time after time, I've seen people come out of this transition wanting to help others.

Traditional psychology in some ways has gotten caught in attempting to become more and more of a medical science, complete with diagnostic categories, and proceeding with therapeutic interventions based on the labeling of these diagnostic categories. I think the whole process can be short circuited if we begin to more actively bring the practice and the understanding of generosity into the mix.

I'm not saying that we won't still go through big life transitions, but a lot of our "holding on" is based on a kind of poverty model of limited resources-limited emotional resources, time resources, financial resources-and the more individualized and fast our culture becomes, the more that part is reinforced. I think a lot of suffering in the world and certainly in the western technological world can be staved off with a much more intelligent understanding of generosity--its psychology, its benefit to the person giving it, certainly its benefit in terms of the community. I lack the words to describe it as deeply as I am beginning to see it.

Just as Daniel Goleman wrote this book called Emotional Intelligence a couple of years ago and people started using the phrase EQ instead of IQ, I think there's a GQ as well-a generosity quotient. We need more understanding of what happens when people give something. Giving can be very simple. It doesn't have to be very ornate. We need to look for the opportunity to give in the moments of our lives. So that's what I'm left with. The field of psychology could actually be much broader and more successful if we brought that in in some substantial, fundamental way instead of placing an emphasis on psychopathology.

HONORING OUR INTERDEPENDENCE

ALISSA: So, you're talking about in terms of actually helping people reach out and help other people.

RICHARD: Yes. And what it does psychologically is enormous-the effects that it has in terms of breaking down isolation. The truth is that we're neither 100% dependent, and we're certainly not independent. We're interdependent. Think of all the people that went into making this short phone interview possible-all of the people that grew the rubber plants to create the insulation for the wires, all the people that laid the wires, all of the people in the shops that made the trucks that helped telephone trucks to go out and do what they do. It just goes on and on and on and on. So I think the practice of generosity is a direct mainline to understanding our interdependence and how we are so ecologically connected with one another. When we act in a very ritual, routinized way on a personal level and on a geopolitical level, we are really going against nature. It could be much easier than this. That's where what I've researched and studied has led me at this point.

ALISSA: I think that's very profound and real. I very much relate to the whole notion of interdependence. I love the Native American concept that if one part of the community is sick, all of the community is sick and needs healing. So that rather than trying to separate out so much from each other and from people who are going through life challenges, we need to be more inclusive. Sometimes, people can't handle being around people who are undergoing adversity and trauma.

RICHARD: That's right. The second thing I wanted to convey in conclusion is the seriousness and the coherence of the passage through the unexpected. One of the reasons that I wanted to write this book is that I wanted there to be something that spoke to people who are in the middle stages of the passage, or who had come out and really didn't have other people to speak to about it. I wanted to show some sense of the importance of trusting nature here-that we are all part of this process and oftentimes, we put a period at the end of the sentence prematurely. There are a lot more sentences to be written.

Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D. is the Director of the Hakomi Institute of San Francisco, and trains therapists and educators throughout the U.S. and England. He is also an Adjunct Professor at both J.F.K University, in California, as well as Union Graduate School, in Ohio. He specializes in body-oriented psychotherapy and has extensive training in family systems work. The author of Crossings: Everyday People, Unexpected Events and Life Affirming Change and of Waking Up Alive, Richard is presently writing a book studying the recovery process from attempted suicide. To find out about Richard's workshops, talks, books, etc., you can reach him at 707-935-8755 or at rheckler@sonic.net.

Alissa Lukara is the author of the memoir Riding Grace: A Triumph of the Soul (Silver Light Publications, February 2007) and president and founder of this nonprofit website, Lifechallenges.org, which provides individuals in 97 countries worldwide with the self help tools they need to cope with and transcend adversity. Riding Grace chronicles Alissa's 12 year quest through the dark night of adult chronic fatigue syndrome and childhood sexual abuse to accept the unacceptable and find wholeness and healing. She offers inspiring workshops and presentations to groups, drawing on her personal healing experiences and the larger perspective she gained from them and empowering people to use challenges to transform their lives. Lukara’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Conscious Women, Conscious Lives, the secret of salt: an indigenous journal, and Ashland Magazine. She can been seen hosting the Southern Oregon community television program, “Transcending Life Challenges.” A Reiki Master, Lukara is currently studying to be a family constellation practitioner which is based on the work of psychotherapist Bert Hellinger. She now makes her home in Southern Oregon with her family. You can write to Alissa at info@lifechallenges.org For information: www.ridinggrace.com.

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