Sacred Suffering

Its hard to write about psychotherapy
in a soulful tongue.
Its hard to listen during psychotherapy
for soul expressing itself.
Psychopomps turned psychotherapists.
All caught up in the trappings of thinking
and of what comes to mind
and the mechanics of bandaids on pain
forgetting how rich and potent mining pain
can be for getting to the essence of things.
Pain is where we all struggle to maintain
integrity under attack, duress, and loss.
Its counter intuitive to stay with it
stay in it. A rite of passage we neglect now.
So soul initiates by making messes of our lives
hardly anyone remembers the rituals,
stories or songs for getting through it.
So we reinvent it over and over but don’t get it.
We just want it to stop and go away.
But we also need it or love it and want it to stay
like the drinking and drugging and puking and cutting
the 10,000 ways of acting out
all triumphs and tribulations made mundane and profane
unconscious, unfeeling, unguided, unimagined
out of relationship to time, to history, ancestors, place.
So we make a holy ground of the psychotherapy space
where the sun and the moon are seen in the soul of self
and the solitary centers are filled with being
and the empty and full is exchanged in every breath
and becoming human is just being real
in the company of someone else who sees you,
and keeps an eye on things so you can go there,
till you learn the way
and can go there and back on your own
and creates language and hears the story of your healing
and watches for the time of new budding
and knows that you are now well rooted,
your trunk strong and with the right degree of flexibility
and welcomes you home to yourself
and then says good bye
go in peace and with love.

-Cynthia Hennard