Tag Archives: community

Checking in

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I am truly grateful that I have so many places where I can check in – with friends and family and colleagues who I love and respect and who love and respect me, and who care about what is going on with me. Not just the stories of what’s happening, but the thoughts and feelings and struggles and joys that I experience as I go through days and phases of my life. When I am with a group, all of us checking in, one by one, going around the circle to each speak what is true for us in that moment, in our lives right now, and being witnessed and held by that circle, I am grateful. And even more so when I hear from some in the circle, as is often the case, that this may be the only place this person has to speak and be heard in this way.

I am reminded of how much I value checking in even beyond my usual home groups that I rely on for this, having just returned from 2 days with the Saybrook College of Mind-Body Medicine residential conference. At this conference where we hold our new student orientation, and coursework for many of the MS and PhD students in the program, there is still room for check-ins. I am so grateful that check-ins are an important part of our work, along with the serious academic rigor of the research work. The best of both worlds!

I rely on the people in my life, the people in my communities, to hold a space for me that I feel even when I am not with them. Knowing I am held in this way, I can go forth and take action in the world, and I can come into my own center when meditating and/or moving alone, and know that I am not truly alone. This means a lot to me, and I thank all of you who are part of the larger community that I belong to. Just by reading this, just by being someone I have contact with in whatever small way, you are part of the community I belong to. In my meditations, I reach out my sense of community even beyond that, to those I don’t know, those I don’t understand, those I struggle with because of actions that they take that seem to me to be harmful to the earth and to other beings who live here. But what helps me to do that reaching beyond is knowing that I have a closer community to come back to, people to check in with on the simplest levels of what it is to live. Even as simple as sharing the food that I eat every day.

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Food & Community

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I have hosted our west coast family Thanksgiving gathering since we finished building the house here at Skyote Mountain. We met before that at the Sacramento home of my first cousin once-removed, but with the loss of a few family members, and the addition of our new home with lots of room for everyone, it made sense for the mantle to be passed to me. There are our core group of family members, other family who may or may not be here, and others who join us for one year or who become regulars along with family. It always feels very special to come together again and celebrate our gratitude for each other and for all that we have, and feasting is definitely a big part of the agenda. I generally roast the turkey and make a stuffing on the side, along with a bread or rolls (Leek Walnut Sourdough this year – that’s becoming a tradition), and a dessert (gluten-free, dairy-free pumpkin pie this year). My aunt Pat and uncle Charlie and their daughter Laura bring makings for mashed potatoes, which get done just before we eat, along with another stuffing (this year they made a artichoke mushroom crustade instead), an Indian spiced green dish, chocolate mousse, and another dessert, usually an apple or pear torte. Others bring sweet potatoes (two different recipes this year), cranberry sauce (with pears this year), and whatever else seems good to add. We had crudites with hummus and mohamra (I made that – I’ll share the recipe here), puff pastries with anchovies, roasted brussels sprouts, gluten-free dairy-free pumpkin walnut bars and some very nice wines.

I love the last minute cooking we do, several things all going on at once in the kitchen. There’s a real sense of community coming together, working together to create this celebratory feast, and enjoying each other’s company for the evening.

Mohamra

I have several recipes for this, each with a different spelling of the name. I had to search for where this particular recipe came from, as it is my favorite. It was published in Bon Appetit in December 1987, in response to a reader’s rave about this Lebanese dish from Fred Habib at the Bourock restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, NY. Thanks to my recipe archive, where this clipping has lived all these years, and Google (which provded Fred Habib’s name), I can credit the source.

2 cups walnuts, ground
3 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 onion, coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 jalapeno chile pepper, seeded and chopped
2 Tbs grenadine molasses, or honey
2 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt

1. Blend the first five ingredients in food processor to coarse grainy puree. Put in a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients.

2. Serve with warm pita.

Servings: 20

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/20 of a recipe (1.5 ounces)
Calories 106
Total Fat 9.11g
Saturated Fat 0.92g
Cholesterol 0mg
Sodium 60.23mg
Potassium 116.15mg
Total Carbohydrates 5.61g
Fiber 1.37g

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A house full of wonderful energy and food

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The second day of our supervision/workshop with Stephen Gilligan went very well, and ended with a lovely dinner, conversation, and singing before bed. The dinner menu:

Salmon Algiers

Couscous with Chickpeas

Salad

Plum Crumble with Ice Cream

 

Fish Algiers

2 lb fish fillet
1 1/3 Tbs cumin seed, whole
3 1/2 Tbs olive oil
3 1/2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, (3 1/2 tblsp.)
1/3 tsp salt
1 dash cayenne
3/4 lb tomatoes, small
lemon wedges
parsley, fresh, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

2. Rinse fish and place, skin side down, in lightly oiled pans.

3. Toast cumin seeds in a dry skillet until aromatic. Take care not to burn. Grind the cumin to a fine powder in a spice grinder.

4. Whisk the toasted cumin with the olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and cayenne.

5. Layer the quartered tomato slices on top of the fish, pour on the marinade, cover, and bake for 20-30 minutes, or until fish flakes easily.

Servings: 6

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1/6 of a recipe (8.1 ounces).
Calories 234.58
Total Fat 8.38g
Saturated Fat 1.14g
Cholesterol 74.67mg
Sodium 215.06mg
Potassium 186.76mg
Total Carbohydrates 4.42g
Fiber 1.1g
Sugar 1.79g
Protein 32.93g

 

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Gluten-free feast

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Just finished cleaning up from a wonderful group of women who came for a day of singing and yoga Saturday at our Skyote Mountain retreat. Heather Houston asked me to cook a gluten-free dinner for us all, so I put this menu together:

Enchiladas Negras (with vinegared onions and cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes)
Quinoa with Latin Flavors
Mixed baby greens salad
Gluten-free Multigrain Miracle Bread

For dessert:

Flourless Poppy Seed Cake with sliced strawberries, peaches, & nectarines

It’s such a joy to feed people delicious and healthy food!

This is how the dinner fit into my own day of eating:

 

 

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More on Ceremony

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Rituals are transformative, while ceremonies are confirmative (Heinz, 2004), although there is certainly room for overlap. In my work I have tended to focus on rituals, planned sequences in sacred space that are designed to shift consciousness, both in the moment of the ritual, and in  lives beyond that moment.

In my workshops teaching ritual I often provide an opportunity for the participants to think of a difficulty in their daily lives that might be supported by a brief ritual. Often this involves transitions that are a challenge, like coming home from work – what does it take to move gracefully out of work consciousness and into being home, either alone or with family? Sometimes this is the time of the day when people struggle with compulsive eating, which might be an unconscious way of nurturing their drained self at the end of a work day. This is a perfect opportunity to invent a ritual that can consciously provide that inner self with some acknowledgment of what is felt in that moment, and a way to move into a different state of consciousness.

Ceremonies, on the other hand, are a formal acknowledgment of a transformation that has already occurred. This brings an internal change into the community’s awareness and the shift is in the consciousness of the community, who can now see the individual in a different light, in a new role or status.

I have already done all the work to achieve this PhD; the ceremony on Sunday will not change anything internally for me. The graduation ceremony focuses on the larger perspective of how I am seen by my friends and family and the community at large. The ceremony is an acknowledgment of the ripples that expand outward from the work I have done, and the ability I have to expand my work beyond myself and beyond the scale of my past endeavors.

This ceremony is also an opportunity to express my gratitude to all of those who have contributed to my process along the way, starting with my parents and grandparents, whose support created a foundation for this possibility long ago (my mother said in an email to me yesterday, “Little miss ‘I want to do it myself’ indeed did it herself”). Every teacher who has ever recognized and supported my gifts and potential in a positive way is part of the path that brought me to this moment. I especially want to recognize a few teachers and mentors, some of whom have become friends, whose influence made a memorable difference in the development of my work: Phil Soinski, Anne Welsh, Sara Shelton Mann, Laura Dean, Stuart Schlegel, Noel King, Frank Barron, Philip Slater, Konrad Fischer, Stephen Gilligan, David Lukoff, Eugene Taylor, Stanley Krippner, and Allan Combs. For a long time I have been teaching and collaborating with a few friends and colleagues, primarily Anodea Judith and Kylea Taylor, and our work together has been an important part of my continued development as a teacher. In addition, the hundreds of students and clients I have worked with over the years have played a significant role in the evolution of my work and my thoughts about how we grow and transform and how we live to the fullest.

These folks are the tip of the iceberg – I am so aware of how I am touched and influenced by everyone I come in contact with. I continue to grow and learn and understand more deeply, and I thank all of you who are part of my life in any way, and those of you who I have yet to connect with. May we all grow and evolve together!

Reference

Heinze, Ruth-Inge. (2004). The nature and function of rituals.

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The Isolated Therapy Office

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Another of my archived columns from the mid-90s. As I reread this, I find myself wondering how much our interconnectedness through the internet has changed things.

The Isolated Therapy Office

by Selene Vega

Santa Cruz CAMFT Newsletter, July/Aug 1995, Therapists for Social Responsibility column

What a strange paradox the work of a psychotherapist is. We sit with an individual or family in a closed room, separate from the rest of their lives, often separate from their relationships, definitely separate from the culture in which their ideas and values have formed. It would be so much more effective to change the environment in which we and our clients live! Unfortunately, though most of us would like to see our culture move towards health, and may be doing our best to help it along in our small ways, we’re not really expecting overnight miracles. In the meantime, we can at least create a safe respite for our clients. From there, we attempt to facilitate a change in the interactions that our clients have with the world outside our office door.

There’s something to be said for the perspective that can be gained from that distance. Perhaps our clients can see a bit more clearly when they are not in the thick of things. In the quiet of this place apart, the relationship we develop with them can move them in ways that seem impossible while they are surrounded by the messages of family and culture. From this safe space, with our support, they can begin to form their own sense of who they are and who they can be.

Of course, the changes that begin in our offices must be sustained in daily life, and this is often the most difficult part of the therapeutic process. We may be working against the cultural current, and our clients may feel as if they are swimming upstream to maintain their progress. Support groups can be a partial remedy for this, particularly if they meet frequently. For example, 12-step groups can provide a community that counteracts the media messages and reinforces the changing values and behaviors of a newly recovering addict. At least their members have a subculture to model and encourage new ways of being that may feel out of step with the rest of the culture.

The cultural messages that our clients incorporate into their own thinking may attack even the concept of therapy. The idea of seeing a therapist may make a client uncomfortable when they are told there is something wrong with them if they can’t “work out their problems” on their own. Those who value therapy as a means of growing further, or finding deeper satisfaction in their lives, or other non-pathological reasons, are a much smaller percentage of the population than we may want to believe. Santa Cruz and the Bay area have a larger than usual sub-culture that honors psychotherapy as part of fulfilling human potential and increasing our effectiveness in the world. Traveling around this month in other parts of the country has reminded me that this is not true everywhere.

I’ve been reading James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse. Hillman and Ventura are concerned about the navel-gazing focus of therapy. They raise many questions about how therapy may be working at cross purposes to social change by keeping people engaged in their individual process without a sense of how that might connect to the rest of the world. That separation and distance that I mentioned at the beginning of this article is one of the aspects of therapy that they see as a problem. How can we help people to be more active in their world by taking them out of it?

I wish I had answers to the questions Hillman and Ventura raise, but even they don’t have answers. They have at least brought to light some issues that are worth pondering, and this is a first step (much as we often tell our clients that their awareness of what they need to change in themselves is the first step towards actually changing it). If we all begin to think about the paradox of therapy taking place so isolated from the cultural context in which our clients’ problems are born, perhaps we can find ways to bridge that isolation. Bringing our own awareness of the world into the work we do can be our first step.

  
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Community

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I’ve been posting these columns from years ago to get this blog going, and to archive these somewhere – but rereading them, I am struck by how simple they seem, almost naive. Has 16 years really changed my thinking? Not so much changed, as left me feeling a pressure towards sophistication. This piece seems like yearning for more simple times – while we are moving further into complexity.

Community

by Selene Vega

Santa Cruz CAMFT Newsletter, Sept./Oct. 1994, Therapists for Social Responsibility column

It seems like whatever topic we start out discussing in Therapists for Social Responsibility we end up talking about community. So many of us struggle to find or create a sense of community for ourselves, and as therapists we are often aware of what a difference community can make for our clients.

By “community” I don’t just mean the town that we live in, though the physical location where we spend our days can be a beginning. That home base is important – perhaps more important than we give it credit for. At this past meeting, each of us talked about our home and how we relate to it. From a physical description of the place that we live, we each moved into our feelings about that place – the healing and grounding of a garden, the freedom and creativity of a table in the house where projects can be spread out and ready to work on whenever the mood strikes, the frustration of streetlights that shine at us all night

As we went around the room, I noticed that part of the description always seemed to involve people – struggles with a roommate, neighbors that we feel a bond or a conflict with, a sense of how our space feels to those who visit us. We may have a relationship with our “place”, but our place is also a home to our relationships with people. Our sense of community starts here, from our homes. In other times and other places where there is less travel and transience, community expands from the home to the town, or at least the neighborhood. Our ancestors grew up surrounded by people they knew, with a sense of community based on history and familiarity and trust

Community today is not such a given. Often our community develops from co-workers, people we work together with on projects, friends we’ve grown relationships with from classes, or groups, or organizations we belong to. Sometimes our community feels scattered, as we may live too far to drop in for tea or to borrow a cup of flour. When we’re sick or lonely, we can feel isolated in a neighborhood of strangers

Though we started this past meeting with descriptions of our homes, we moved from that very personal vision into the overwhelmingly large issue of the failed crime bill. We tossed ideas and opinions back and forth, airing frustrations, disappointments, outrage, etc. with the attempts of our government to keep us safe from violence. But when we asked ourselves what truly COULD protect us from violence, it was not about government legislation. We found ourselves talking once again about community. If we lived in communities where we knew our neighbors and all watched out for each other, we could be safer. If children were raised in communities that felt secure, where there were more adults than just the parents who might be available to talk to, where the whole neighborhood felt like home, then perhaps gangs would feel less need to create their territories

Malidoma Patrice Somé , author of Ritual: Power, Healing and Community speaks of his village in West Africa where the children are welcome to eat in any house of the village for dinner. They just follow their noses to the culinary smells that appeal to them and show up at the door. He describes a world very different from ours, and one that we can’t really recreate here. But we can begin to think about what community means to us and how we might create it for ourselves, our families, our clients.

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