Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Potapshyn
Daniel Potapshyn, M.A. and Roland Hulstein, M.S.W. have been teaching Home Hospice volunteers and staff how to journey and how to use these methods in their work of bereavement and self-care. Daniel is the Bereavement Program Coordinator for Sutter VNA & Hospice in Emeryville , California
(A conversation. LL is Lanz Lowen, R is Roland Hulstein and D is Daniel Potapshyn)
LL: How did you first marry shamanism to your work with grief?
R: Originally we were interested in bringing spirituality to our grief work and Daniel and I started talking about how we could incorporate shamanism into a grief workshop that focused on spirituality. We called the 6-week group, Explorations of Grief Using Spirituality. We didn't say shamanism, although we described shamanic journeying when people called to inquire.
The response was encouraging and that got the wheels turning. People on the staff, volunteers and interns began asking us questions and wanting to learn more about what we were doing, so we set up some workshops for them. We were very taken by the simplicity of coming together for two hours with these people and the depth of their commitment and how they could learn journey techniques and really make something meaningful happen for themselves.
D: A significant piece, also, was the idea that maybe there's a spirit guide that's specifically there for us to help us work with our grief. So that's the journey we offered to the people who came to this spirituality group and to the interns and volunteers. Along the time of our initial offerings, we heard about the National Hospice Organization meeting coming up in Long Beach
LL: Did you think it was going to be accepted?
R: I gave it a 20-30% chance.
D: I was 50-50, but it felt like a fantasy - if it were accepted it would be incredible.
R: What helped was that co-workers were very encouraging and supportive, including financially.
D: So we were accepted - this was in '99, and we were expecting like 25 people to come to our workshop, but they kept arriving. We had about a hundred people crammed in the hotel room and we had to turn others away at the door.
R: So here are people sitting in chairs and then sitting on the floor between the altar and the chairs. The room is completely filled with people, there's no place to lie down. We had to let go of any preconceived ideas, like lying down to do shamanic journeys. But people had amazing journeys the spirit was so powerful.
LL: So you had a great turnout and it sounds like people had some real success.
D: Incredible.
R: It was wonderful energy.
LL: Why?
R: We were providing a place where the spiritual could be opened up without religious overtones. And the people who showed up had a hunger for that. We opened it up, of course, as we do in circles with smudging and rattling and calling in the spirits. By the time we were ready to journey, the spirit was so strong with these folks and their hearts were wide open.
D: And tending to the dying is so sacred, yet it's often forgotten how sacred it is in the day-to-day business of hospice work. So bringing in the sacred, acknowledging what we're doing every day with people dying, and recognizing the layers of grief that we hold - this was a place to come and do all of that and be in community in a different way with each other. We heard afterwards how unusual it was to have a session at the conference focused on caring for the hospice worker and how important this was.
R: We had hospice specialists, hospice social workers, but we also had many managers and directors of programs in that workshop. They're all responsible for holding the grief.
LL: It sounds like part of what they got was being held by something bigger them themselves. Can you remember any particular journeys?
D: I remember one journey where the grief power animal ended up being a deer. A year prior, the woman had hit and killed a deer on a backcountry road. At the time she had killed the deer, she felt it had entered her, but she hadn't thought much about it. So in her journey to find a grief power animal, the deer showed up, and she came back just overwhelmed. She realized the deer had come to help her with her grief surrounding her mother's death.
R: Another woman was journeying to find a grief power animal to help her with her father's death and she was met by a child she had aborted at a much younger age. The child shows up and says, "I'm okay, mom, it's okay." And she realized she'd been holding her grief for that child all these years. It was totally unexpected and very important healing.
D: A similar thing happened when we were invited to present at the Florida Society of Oncology Social Workers, a bit later. Two women who were sitting side by side had been experiencing coincidences all week. When they journeyed, one encountered a young man and the other encountered a young woman. As they shared their journeys, they realized that they each had seen the respective child that the other had lost. In that room at that moment, when they shared and discovered what was happening...I'm getting chills...it was incredible. So unexpected.
LL: People are affected in a powerful way just by witnessing something like that.
R: And these are social workers, these are people who don't ordinarily do this kind of thing. They're grounded; dealing with the pragmatic; dealing with other people's grief; and suddenly here's their own. At the close of our workshop, when we're thanking Spirit, everyone is right there feeling tremendous gratitude.
LL: Do you find that certain power animals do more grief work than others or is it pretty random?
D: It's been really random so far, it's very unique to the individual.
LL: It sounds like you've gone in two directions. One is supporting care givers and one is helping people deal with their grief?
R: We usually do two different journeys. The first is focused on self-care - what information could you gain from a power animal to help you take care of yourself. The second is focused on finding a specific power animal to help you with your own personal grief or the grief that comes up in working with others.
LL: Have you kept up with any of these folks? You're introducing them to shamanism and they're getting this profound initial experience, what happens beyond that?
D: We have had some e-mail correspondence from the folks in Florida Long Beach Florida Johns Hopkins University
R: We're considering doing a day long workshop in the Bay Area for those folks who have already participated and had meaningful experiences, to go a little deeper and have a longer time together.
D: We carried it a little bit further here just last night, we did our second workshop circle here at Hospice. We had 15 people come and they want to continue so we may hold a monthly circle.
LL: What's been the impact on the two of you?
D: It's just become part of my work, which is like a huge blessing. I can't believe that I'm doing the work I wanted to do, grief work, as well as having my spirituality be a part of my everyday life at work. So it continually amazes me.
I did a training a couple of weeks ago for 30 Filipino hospital workers, mostly Christian Filipino women. I was afraid going into it thinking, "Am I going to just look foolish presenting this, beating a drum in front of these women who are Christian." But I did it anyway. It was a day long event for them with one workshop every hour and I was the last one. But on their evaluations 80% said they wanted more of the shaman, more learning how to journey. It was the most significant piece of the day for them, which is not at all what I would have expected. It continually blows me away. So if it's changing me, it's changing me in wanting more and more to be able to do this work and trusting the Spirits work in very mysterious ways.
R: It's not like we've been pushing this to happen or putting it out a lot. It's really more like it's coming to us and we're being asked. We're giving what we know to others and they can teach one another and move it around.
LL: Yes, you two always sound amazed whenever you describe what has just happened to you.
R: We're humbled by our experience. One of the questions we've asked from the beginning is, Hmm, we're doing this workshop, two hours long, and participants are learning journey skills and having such profound experiences. The Foundation takes two days to introduce people to basic shamanism, and that's how you start. So we're circumventing that; it's like a puzzle - the success of the journeys. The Spirit is so strong; it's not the same teaching model.
LL: You have a very select audience. They're not necessarily coming for self-healing. They're used to helping people deal with dying, so maybe they're ripe.
R: Yes, they're ripe in a different way. They don't come to us and say, "I want to learn shamanism." They're coming because they're part of a community that does this work with grief and they're yearning to honor the sacredness of their work.
LL: So there's a context for it. They are part of a community to some extent and they are already doing sacred work. My guess is they already know about Spirits to some extent.
D: What is different about this last group that I did, because I was put on the agenda, they had no idea what they were getting into. They didn't voluntarily come to this. They were just wide-eyed, like, "What are you saying?" when I was talking about what we were going to do. And I even asked one woman, "Are you okay?" She said, "Yeah, when are we going to journey?"
Because of the circumstances, I had to rattle and invite in the directions in the car, but I spoke more than usual about the history of shamanism. I explained that back then you didn't have western medicine to do the surgery and do chemo and whatever we do now. They dealt by developing their relationships with the Spirits. Shamanism was the medicine of then. This is the medicine of now and there's been a great divide, a separation. And I think maybe there's a familiarity when they bump up against this. "Oh, this is healing work, this is how they did it." It's a way to connect with their ancestors who did it a different way. As nurses trying to heal, they are like the shamans of their modern community. Somehow it creates more room to hold both the old and the new in a more balanced way.
LL: Have you connected with other people doing shamanic work with grief? I know many others have been doing more traditional psychopomp work, but your work is focused on grief as opposed to helping people move to the other side.
R: Right. At the Oracle gathering, we had some dialogue with folks who do psychopomp work, and it sounds like wonderful things they're doing. We had taken the Death and Dying Workshops, but we just haven't been led in that direction. It still might come up, but it hasn't been what we do.
D: If there are others focusing on grief work or are just interested, we would love to begin a dialogue. The ancestral shamanism work we did with the Montana Montana
LL: It makes me wonder about the larger frame of grief in our society. I think of how much grief has come up in our recent work in supporting Israel Palestine
R: It's individual grief and it's community grief.
D: It's grief buried so deep it comes out only in a journey. Hospice workers know this; it's what drew them to the work. But it may have become routine, and they need to reconnect.
R: With the sacredness of grief and with their colleagues. Just with two circles here, we can really feel a difference. Something has shifted. There's a closeness, a sense of community that was not here before.
D: And simply attending to the grief that they have has lightened them. And they're getting a greater appreciation of what this work can do and their own need for ongoing, sacred community.
LL: Thank you both for your work and your willingness to share with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment