It is not very often one meets an individual whose extraordinary capacities fire something deep and unique within us. Someone who changes our life in the most important and enduring ways. Someone who sees something so essential about ourselves and in so doing, illuminates its nature profoundly and afresh.
A beautiful late spring day some seventeen years ago, I met Ross Laing for the first time. In a therapeutic circle at the Mill property earlier that year, my estranged husband had uttered my name with a veiled poignancy the master physician could not ignore. Indeed, he is so finely attuned to the emotional resonances of even the most deadpan deliveries, that his responses will often elicit a watershed insight.
The astute efficacy of Ross’s response that day would yield Sheldon’s first prescription: to bring me to see him, together, at his Mississauga office – in short order. (Sheldon had gone to see Ross on his own following a fortuitous encounter at a party with a Ross veteran to whom he had disclosed his dissatisfaction with his therapist and whose high and unequivocal recommendation was distinctly compelling.)
I was also at the time in individual therapy. Unlike Sheldon, however, I was very satisfied with the process, even though I harbored a particular suffering that was increasingly intense and unyielding. Namely, to conceive and bear a child. With the esteemed and competent Dr. W., I was no closer to its realization, despite all that I was learning about myself and my relations. No closer, despite a relentlessly-driven schedule of appointments at the fertility clinic, with the acupuncturist, and with a host of healers of every stripe and ilk. However fruitful and enlightening, no amount of talk, confined to the fifty minute sessions of upright, seated, more-or-less habitual exchange, was able to guide me into new realms of awareness and disclosure. No amount of discipline, of willing, of longing, could usher me to regions of self-evident clarity and the wakeful pulse of the heart. It was not until I was a patient of Ross’ and a member of the Mill community circle, that I began at once to open to much deeper, authentic sources of self as agents of change, as agents of birth.
On that fateful spring day, a mere first meeting with Ross in his office was sufficient to alight in me something I dare say I had never felt before: my “I am that I am”, from the Hebrew “haya”, “to be”; and the response God gave in the bible when Moses asked his name. In Ross’ domain, the talk of therapy is re-enlivened such that we can begin to imagine leading a Word-like life, wherein our actions convey our best meaning and our thinking coincides with our doing.
Everything properly seen is a word. The first work of creation – the creation of the world itself – is an act of speech; the Lord’s: “Let there be light”. The most important and cherished moments of our life are thus marked by speech that has a special efficacy to it: When, for example, the bride says: “I do”. The words are not merely information, but a deed unto themselves.
Such was the character of the words between us that day in Ross’ office and on countless occasions since, where I have experienced in his midst, the goodness of the created world as the goodness of speech. Indeed, everything good that comes about in human life comes about through the word, whether it is spoken or not: every road that is built, every meal that is cooked, every grain that is sewn – it all takes place through what human beings have said or have meant.
With Ross’ guidance, I practice doing, doing as speech; the slightest act of which I glean ever-more consciously as representing the same magic of creation, in miniature. Meaningful action is an act of speech. It says something. Meaningful action is also moral action; a true thought carried out as a good deed. (When we plan, say, to stop smoking and we do not carry it out, it is akin to a lapse in grammar because our actions no longer convey our meaning. We are failing – as the saying goes – to keep our word.)
In Ross’ therapeutic realm, I succumb to a special kind of allowing, a focused relaxation, wherein I can begin to act out my intuitions, if only occasionally, with the same effortlessness by which I utter my words. As my thinking deepens – approaching its deep source – so too, my deeds become meaningful, become blessed, as it were. I put myself in a meaning-making frame of mind; moving my body to signify – to mean – and not, to exert power. I am guided towards a balance of control and release – a kind of “soft will” – that leads not only to personal, but evolutionary growth; that is, my doing melting into “World’s doing”. In this focused and relaxed place – akin to the attention we observe in small children – I bring my whole self to every task.
Ross elicits in me a profound obedience (from the Latin for “hearing”; to hear the guidance of Spirit) such that my actions become obedient to my thoughts. As I practice doing, I learn to make presence of mind a daily habit. I learn to lead a life of significant improvisation (vs. senseless repetition) – that is; acting with presence of mind – free from any sense of constraint (i.e., those of the normal self that identifies with the body, with personal history, with personal successes and resentments). I become the Self that lights up at moments of intense attentiveness. I awaken. I become my Self, profoundly and afresh.
Vivien Carrady – October 27, 2014
Vivien Carrady
Recent Comments