📅 Thought for today:
‘The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.’
— Anaïs Nin
#thoughtfortoday #knowledge #mystery #wonder #supervision #parallelprocess #astounding
As I re-read the final chapter of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book “My Stroke of Insight”, where she talked about the mysteries of the right hemisphere and enlightenment, a lightbulb went off. Here was a connecting piece of a jigsaw puzzle that included Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, Betty Edwards “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, Julia Cameron’s “The Artists’ Way”, and just about any meaningful book you have ever read about meditative practice.
I’ve read all of the named books and a lot of books on meditative practice – both Mindfulness and Transcendental Meditation.
And then…
In our supervision training yesterday we spent time working together on the mystery that is parallel process.
I sat with a partner (I’ll call her M) and brought a client to mind. I did not speak, I did not in any way describe or explain who or what my client was experiencing or who they were. Or even that it was a female client.
Then M described the physical sensations that came up for her. What she felt (and I saw her hands trembling for instance) mapped very well onto my client. She was describing things that my client had experienced, and is experiencing, in too much detail to be coincidence or confirmation bias. This happened time and again around a room with sixteen people.
A mystery to some, but it makes perfect sense to me, and whilst in a way it felt like a seance, it also felt like an invisible layer of interconnectedness had been revealed.
I cannot explain it, yet I experienced it. It was an astounding day.
