When Ruins Are All
That’s Visible:
Exploring the chaotic
moment in transformative learning.
An
organic inquiry by
Brenda Peddigrew © 2003
“a death blow is a life blow to some
who till they died, did not alive become
who, had they lived, had died, but when
they died, vitality begun.”
(Emily Dickinson)
Even though old water
Seeps through hair and skin,
Even though a hard dark
Presses stone against my
face,
Even though the edges of my
outline
Dance formless away from the
light,
Even though I have no words
to say
That say anything true,
Even though silence pulls me
Into her irresistible
vortex,
Even though it took me
fifty-one years to reach
The junction of knowing
nothing---
Even now
I will refuse the old
footholds.
I will not go back.
If I spin in space forever
Unknowing, I will not go
back.
I will stay, suspended,
Until something takes me
Since I cannot take myself.
Introduction: Why this question?
There comes a moment in the natural
process of change when ruins are all that’s visible. Too soon to see anything
good in the new, still reeling from loss or gain or a sudden change in
circumstances or a new idea or a gradual shift in worldview, suddenly felt -
this moment of chaos is often skipped over as soon as possible in the natural
effort to get to solid ground.
In the brief description above I am
tracing my own experience with the change process and as I have heard it repeated
by friends and colleagues finding themselves in the grip of unsought change.
Again and again, a first response is to move as quickly and as blindly as
possible through the chaotic moment, to get to anywhere even vaguely familiar,
all the while holding tightly to the comfort of old patterns until they are
wrenched away from our powerless hands in the rush of life’s large current.
I am presently inside such a deep
life change, and this time, with the opportunity offered by this course, have
decided to intentionally explore that moment rather than ride it over the
surface, as I have customarily done.
I was also led to this question by
a sentence written by Jack Mezirow (2000) in his opening essay in Learning as Transformation:
“Transformative learning, especially when it involves subjective
reframing, is often an intensely threatening emotional experience in which we
have to become aware of both the assumptions undergirding our ideas and those
supporting our emotional responses to the need to change.” (p.6-7)
Later in the same essay, he states
that
“as challenging one’s cherished beliefs (a leap into the unknown) often
invokes a threatening emotional experience, the qualities that constitute
emotional intelligence are essential conditions for transformative learning.”
(p.24)
Yet, as I searched further for more
specific descriptors of that “threatening emotional experience”, I could find
no narratives of the moment that for me seems the crucial bridge to be crossed
into the expanded consciousness and knowledge offered by the nudge of change.
This lack precipitated my question.
What is its taste and smell and
sound? What images nourish and push us in and out of this place of ultimate
discomfort? What does the body say during such times, that trustworthy and
mostly ignored compass? What is the particular role of this moment in
transformative learning?
As my own life shifts - both
deepens and accelerates – propelling me into actions that sometimes seem too
many and too fast, I want to know more about this unavoidable moment. I want to
sit with my fear of it and request its secrets. I am curious about how
essential it seems to change of any kind. How can I honor rather than flee from
its teaching?
To explore the chaotic moment in
the transformative process I have chosen to use Organic Inquiry as an approach.
Life change – loss of work, terminal illness, falling in love, death, birth of children,
being jolted by new ideas, winning a large sum of money – these experiences
very often bring us face-to-face with realizing that we are not fully in charge
of our own lives. There are forces beyond us, moving us often into currents
that we would not choose. Some people call these forces “sacred”; others call
them “transpersonal” in the meaning of Charles Tart (1995) when he describes
the “general transpersonal perspective…[as one that] “seeks to understand our
fundamental unity and oneness with each other and all life.” (quoted in Braud
and Anderson, p. xxii)
It is that deep underlying
interdependance with all life that moves us forward into unexpected change, and
OI specifically includes that dimension of the sacred and transpersonal in its
honoring of chthonic knowing.
OI is also a method that begins in
the personal and it is my own chaotic encounter with intense change that has
catalyzed my curiosity about the role of this particular moment. I also hear
from my clients (as well as my own quaking heart) that this moment is a
stumbling block; that, because of it, or the fear of it, some stay stuck in a
life that might be described as one of silent despair. Yet they can’t go
forward because of the rumbling of chaos that makes itself felt before change
even comes about.
Intimations of chaos vibrate within
a person even as external events shake and stir familiar patterns. The authors
of Organic Inquiry (Clements, Ettling, Jennet & Shields) 1999
describe the chthonic as beginning
“after the seed has been planted yet before any noticeable growth has occurred
above ground. It is the subterranean aspect of the process in which all is
hidden from light and from that which is consciously known.” (p.35) The chaotic
moment which intrigues me enough to pursue this study is born in the place
described here as “chthonic”. The germination of a seed of change often takes
long periods of time to result in the actual moment of change; nevertheless,
chthonic knowing nudges and nourishes the progress of change. So many people,
myself included, will say “I knew this all along” when they suddenly find
themselves making changes they didn’t set out to make deliberately. This
statement indicates the presence of chthonic knowing, and it highlights a
significant stage in the chaotic moment.
OI also recognizes the value of the
relational (Clements et.al) 1999. As I begin this inquiry I suspect that the
degree of relationality possible in the chaotic moment influences the quality
of the transformative learning that is also possible. In OI, transformation is
not only a goal for the initiating researcher, but for the co-researchers and
those who will eventually encounter the material. Relationality is thus a key
value in the organic approach, and in my own experience of the chaotic moment.
Finally, the goal of OI is
transformation of the researchers and ultimately of the readers. Unlike most
other research methodologies, the purpose is not a concrete result such as new
information, but an actual transformative effect on persons who relate their
stories and on those who encounter them. My purpose in pursuing the nature of
the chaotic moment in transformative learning is to experience with more
awareness and intention my own chaotic moments, so that I can better learn
transformatively; i.e., be transformed. Already I know that the chaotic moment
is ever new, no matter how many times I experience it, and I want to be more
consciously engaged with its (to me) frightening powers.
In these ways, my questions aligns
with the OI approach.
OI Principles Applied to Design
To invite stories of the chaotic
experience in the moment of change, I articulated five “story prompts” for
interview purposes. Under two prompts I listed a few questions that would help
me get at what I needed for this inquiry should the co-researcher stray from
the story. I sensed a need to focus on the question myself, to “hold it”
interiorly, both before and during the interviews. On paper, I expressed it
this way:
STORY DETAILS lead to
PIVOTAL CHAOTIC MOMENT: feelings, struggle, choice.
Before each story session I set an
intention to focus on the nature of the chaotic moment, rather than on the
story details. Here are the prompts and sub-questions used:
Tell me a situation in your life
that you consider to be life-changing in a significant way.
Tell me when you knew the pivotal moment in that situation.
- why was that the pivotal
moment?
-
what were you feeling inside at that moment?
-
What images, feelings, body sensations were you feeling
at the height of the intensity?
Those whom I invited to co-inquire
with me are friends whom I knew had gone through significant life changes and
had earlier expressed to me intimations of chaos during those experiences. Í am
using pseudonyms here, for Barbara W., a woman in her early fifties who has
recently resigned from working at a group home for homeless teenage girls in
order to discern a meaningful direction for her life; for Margaret J., a
fifty-three year old naturopathic doctor who has also been a champion kayaker
and avid caoeist; and for Paul G., a fifty-six year old Roman Catholic priest
who remains a pastor while continuing educational pursuits.
Original
Words: the Stories
Barbara W. speaks:
"I feel like in my life I’ve had many
significant moments of change where I’ve done an almost 360 degree turn. The
one that comes to mind right now, for whatever reason, is my process in deciding
to leave the convent. Somehow I think that’s probably the beginning of the most
significant change and it also feeds me when I’m at that point – I’ve been at
that point in other places in my life – feeds me in terms of trusting my
instincts and intuitions are right and I’ll still be ok.
As I think back to that time, the very first
realization that I had after leaving the novitiate and living in the community
– I had a realization that the ideals I had thought were religious life weren’t
there. I couldn’t find them…this was the pivotal moment and it came after an
experience of betrayal by a person in authority: I was forced to leave a place
where I had wanted to stay – I was sent against my will to do something that I
had no experience to do.
I felt like everything that I believed in was tossed
in the air and that all the ideals I had around people in religious life being
trustworthy and being honest – all that was tossed in the air and where was I
in all that?
I felt confusion, mistrust and betrayal.
Inside I didn’t know who I was anymore. I defined
myself according to the expectations and I thought I was secure in my identity
– knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. This experience threw all
of this up in the air and I had no idea who I was and where I was going and
what did I want to do?
Inside I felt like an earthquake…like one small crack
started and opened up a chasm of what appeared to be total disorder and
destruction. There was no rhyme nor reason, nor was I able to control it or
keep it together, nor would it ever go back the same way. The crack kept
getting wider and then there was like this major thing like—that’s it –
everything’s gone.
I don’t remember any body feelings at that time
becauseI lived in my head andIdon’t feel I was very connected to my body. The
earthquake conveyed the most intense feeling…everything was in ruins and
nothing was identifiable any longer. The hardest part was not knowing. Not
knowing anything. Not knowing what was happening, totally; not knowing why it
was happening, not knowing who I was in the moment, who I would become, or if
everything would be ok.
The tipping point for me was counselling. A priest
who reminded me that Ididn’t have to stay in religious life, then another
sister – a superior at the time – who said to me “spend some time thinking
about what it will cost you to stay another year…what are you going to pay? (I
had decided to stay for a year even after deciding to go). She made me see I
was holding on to something that was gone…
As I look back on that time I still very much looked
externally for my direction and guidance…I didn’t trust in my own internal
process. My conversation with her was an external signal allowing me to come to
the place of “what am I waiting for?”
This pivotal experience opened me out to my own
internal compass – for the rest of my life – absolutely. I carry an image of a
seed being planted in the ground – that moment when the first shoot starts to
move upwards and the first root starts to move downwards, where there’s this
cracking of the shell…that’s what I would describe as the chaos moment, where
there’s a breaking out of the externally imposed structure to create something
as of yet unknown.
Telling this story now is healing…I have felt this
process of telling it –especially when I didn’t expect to –it just came up unexpectedly when you asked the question. I am feeling that the last
part of this is healed and I can put it behind me. I hadn’t realized that
there’s still a connection there."
Margaret J. speaks:
"I can think of three situations that have
similar qualities of significant impact and I can see something common to all
of them. Each had a spot or a moment in them that felt like I had to step over
a hole, or a chasm, that in the moment felt undoable. But in each of them I
went through that spot.
That absolute spot where my life is going to move forward whether I like it or not…move
forward in a different way…there’s a tremendous moment of resistance. When my
husband of seventeen years announced out of the blue that he was leaving,
change came from outside me and it did really feel like a chasm opened up and I
was dropped into it whether i liked being there or not. Absolutely nothing was
familiar. It was as if I had stepped off this world and was into a space that
didn’t have a world to it yet – it was a gap – I like to think of it as a gap,
a chasm, a completely shocked feeling that felt unending because I couldn’t see
anything on the other side. My initial body sense was of tremendous resistance
and yet at the same time there’s a forward momentum happening no matter how
much I resist. And because it happened in such an intense moment from the
outside that I had no choice about it, and I didn’t even really see it coming –
so I was choosing to hang on to the world that was familiar to me. Then
suddenly I was in this chasm where I was numbly groping around in a space.
Knowing there was no choice but to keep moving forward. You can’t stop and you
can’t move backwards because there’s some force that’s moving you forward, even
though everything about it is totally unfamiliar. And there was an edge of
absolute terror beyond description and at the same time a feeling that you’re
being moved forward.
…I say “chasm” because the space of unfamiliarness seems
so gigantic that there’s no boundary to it whatsoever. My Arctic experience
[four years ago] was different only in the sense that – instead of having it
thrust upon me from an external source, I was moving towards the unfamiliarity.
I felt myself moving towards it because everything I knew to do – all the
familiar tools of my landscape weren’t working. I was running out of being able
to engage my familiar things and I could feel that my options were getting less
and less and less. I was moving towards this same point without knowing…all I
really knew was this escalated feeling that whatever I knew was not working and
the desperateness was that my options for more possibilities were running out.
Before, Dave was moving towards that point and – boom – I was in it. But in the
Arctic, I was moving towards it, and when I finally hit the spot where I felt I
had completely run out of options – there was this numb panic, like before,
where my sensors going out into the world were completely numbed. I had no reference
at this spot. Again there was a feeling of wanting to hold something back or to
hold time back…and there was a point in the Arctic in particular where the
intensity was so big and I couldn’t stop being moved into it that I just had to
surrender into it – like that trust exercise where you fall and hope someone’s
going to catch you, because you feel like you just can’t hold back and you
can’t hold out this new thing that’s coming over you and it reaches a peak
point again where you just have to surrender to it. Everything in you has been
exceeded.
I resisted this feeling as long as I could. I could
feel that gradually I was losing the familiar feeling that I could function in this space, losing it as
this new thing kept coming at me.
So the “chasm” – in that magnitude – produced not
emptiness but such extreme chaos that I had to have some response to it. My
initial response to my husband’s decision was to stay in this kind flat place –
not exactly numb, but – I have to use the technical word “depressed” – though
I’d rather say ‘dulled’. In the Arctic I didn’t have that option because I was
still being demanded upon to be present and respond; my life depended on me
moving the paddle along and functioning with the other three people.
The struggle was between admitting that life in both
moments was no longer working, and
finding something new, but I couldn’t think of anything new. The struggle was
to let go of all the ways I had identified my coping…identified with that way
of coping. My identity was that no longer what came along, I would cope by
being this macho force. I could up to then always reach in and find this
forceful bravado which up to then had worked. So I was struggling not only to
cope with a new situation but a new way to identify myself.
So in some way I was offering the whole thing up…I
had to offer up my beingness here. The words sound extreme, but that’s exactly
how it felt. Resistance was to giving up my old identity.
On the outside I kept doing the physical things that
were asked of me, but on the inside I was doing them from a very different place. Instead of doing them from a pushing
place, which is where I’d carried it off before, i was doing it from a
surrendered place, where – if I failed – it wouldn’t matter. In the Arctic –
unlike the earlier experience of numbing out – my sense were heightened to such
a degree that I could feel there were other things available to me – that I
didn’t know about – I had the strength to keep going as long as i stayed in
this heightened open place.
The tipping point came when – there was a moment when
the pain of staying in my old identity was so intensely exquisite that I was
willing to contemplate dying. There was an instant that felt like “ok, give it
up”, and this gave relief. So there was for awhile a dance, between moments so
painful I knew I couldn’t tolerate another second of it and moments of
surrendering into the feeling of “ok, let the whole thing go”, which felt like
I was welcoming an obliteration – to die – only that’s not what came.
What came was a limitless feeling of being embraced
by some huge compassionate force that would provide the continuous abundance
that I had surrendered into. It was my first taste of compassion and
heartfulness in the universe that would embrace me and would arise from me and
that’s what I fell into with the surrender.
In all three cases [only two used here] I could feel
the internal energetic dance between something that was trying to pull me
forward into something new, and my internal resistance that didn’t want to go
there, as if I’m holding back the current, wanting to go in the other
direction. That for me is the essence of the experience."
Paul G. speaks:
I’d say I was around 31 years old, ordained about
eight years, and I was beginning to see things I didn’t like, about myself and
where I was and what I was doing. I began to withdraw into myself. I’m
naturally an introvert so my first thing is to always go in. So I became much
more quiet and much more by myself and I used to take long walks and that kind
of thing.
The best image I have of this time – I’ll always
remember it – you know when you’re hiking in the woods and you’re walking over
the dead twigs and sometimes they crack a little? That’s the image I always
have about my feelings then. I felt like a twig after being walked on…
This image showed me that – like the dry twig –
everything was cracking open. I’ll start with me. My perception of myself and
who I was and what I was about. As I began to work through that I began to see
it in terms of the community in which I was working and then it spread out to
the world and how I related to co-workers and institutions and family,
something like a rock thrown in the water, a ripple effect – it just spread
out. I let it spread out. I didn’t try to contain it. I knew I couldn’t – well
I could but I didn’t want to. I knew it was a time I had to face this and work
at it. I had to – otherwise Ii would die and rot and become one of those dry
twigs.
There wasn’t a pivotal moment as much as a gradual
awakening, on lots of fronts; for instance all the questions that would come
into my mind: “is this all there is?” And “am I to spend the rest of my life
doing this?” And “is there more and what’s the more like and where will I go to
find it and do I want to stay here with this for the rest of my life and if I
do what are the implications of that?” And I saw the implications and I thought
“ok, I’m not staying here.”
A few years later when I was studying at Notre Dame I
heard about “liminal moments” and then I had a name for what I had moved into
then. I could identify with that word: all the securities that you had left,
all the anchors in your life were gone. And you knew they wouldn’t hold, so
there was no point relying on them anyway. You had no idea where you were going
but you figured you had to take this road anyway.
People would say to me “you’re changed. What happened
to you? You’re different.” I wouldn’t say anything, or “I’m the same – there’s
things happening”, and I’d just go on.
I didn’t see any point in sharing with my co-workers,
who were all priests anyway because a lot of them wouldn’t know what you were
talking about, and they wouldn’t be able to affirm or support you in any way,
so there was no point sharing with them, really.
My family would wonder what was going on but never
really ask. My appearance changed, my hair style. I was wearing clothes and
doing things that reflected what was going on in me. I was dressed like a
liminal person, right? I didn’t dress in a [Roman] collar and black suit and
stuff like that.
And my speech changed, and the other thing that
struck me as I was going through this period was something I read in Thomas
Merton – about the false self – and that struck me – that up until now, until
this change occurred in me, I felt I was living out a lot of other people’s
expectations, which created a false self. So I was shedding all that and
finding an authentic me here and so a lot of stuff I would normally do because
people expected me to, I stopped all that.
…I make a distinction between the time before – a
very dead time – just taking care of business, trying to do inner stuff but not
knowing really what to do with it. But when I walked in the woods and made the
decision to absolutely go with it, the time of the liminal period was absolute
turmoil.
Everything was called into question – God, Church, in
which I am a minister, all of the clergy, my co-workers – and being in a job I
wasn’t adequately prepared for. I knew two weeks after ordination that I couldn’t
do the job that was expected of me pastorally. Yet I carried on for about seven
years and wouldn’t do the kind of things they expected me to do. I had no
interest in it and that caused great trouble.
But yet the other side of that was that I was more
alive than I’d ever been. I was happy at the time. I remember driving the car
on the Trans-Canada [highway] on this real beautiful sunny day in July and Ii
was just in tune with everything in the world, just glorious; I can put myself
right back there behind that wheel. I can feel the sun, I can feel the motion,
I can feel the earth – because as you know in July Newfoundland is beautiful. I
remember the trees and all that…
But also this isn’t a linear thing, you know – all
this is going on at the same time. And also at the same time great sadness. I
was grieving, when I look back on it now, grieving for a whole way of life that
I knew I was leaving and I knew I couldn’t come back to it. And it took me a
long time – I began to see people differently. In some way people weren’t
important until then because I was shaped in a structure and by this time I was
completely institutionalized really. But once I started coming out of it, the
institution was left behind and it’s not important to me at all.
[another expression of the turmoil] was that I had
heartburn all the time. Everywhere I went I had to have tums or liquid stuff in
a bottle in the car, in the office. Once I went to a doctor for it and told him
I had permanent heartburn for some reason and he gave me a prescription for it and when I got it, it was phenobarb. I
knew what that was and I said “well, I’m not taking a single one of these,” and
I flushed them down the toilet.
I was also in great shape during that time; I got
back to the weight I was as a teenager, fishing with my father, and as a young
man. The other thing I remember is that I could sleep anywhere then, which is
not the case now.
Even though I was going through all this, some part
of me felt safe. I was always a reader, and I suppose from that I suspected
that if I followed the life stuff I’d be ok. And I still try to do that. I
don’t know if I’ve ever come out of it, in a way – all that still influences
me, it’s where my energy comes from.
[doing a degree] at Notre Dame helped settle some of
the issues. Study is a great liberator. I knew I could hold my own with people
from all over and that empowered me. I finally felt prepared for my work. The
heartburn stopped around then – after 7-8 years. I also learned that I could
have adult relationships within my own boundaries and enjoy them.
Study affirmed my whole process, even my drifting
away from the institutional church and even though I was studying liturgy. But
I’m still a liminal person and it makes people uncomfortable. For some reason I
can be there. I just have to be me. This is me. I stay faithful to the inner
stuff all the time. My Progoff journal is always by my chair. It helps me keep
my inner life central, then I know where I am in the outer world.
It’s interesting to talk about this now – I don’t get
to talk about it much in this way. I find it very affirming – it affirms once
again that [this path] is right for me and [becoming the liminal person] at
that time was the right thing to do."
(Two days after this session Paul G. asked for
another conversation about what this interview had evoked for him. It had
stirred more old memories and was causing him to do more inner work on seeing
his life journey from this perspective.)
My own story
"The change I need to explore is the one I’m
presently in the midst of, because this is a long life-change and yet it is
very current and I move through layer after layer of it. What I’m talking about
is the situation of moving away from familiar environments and behaviours. I
thought that by changing my outer environment – here’s the nature of the
chaotic moment – I’m terrified to speak about it – right now my throat is
closing. (cough, cough, cough.)
When my throat closes I’m in deep fear. I also feel a
breathlessness and when I resist breathing in I know I’m holding against
feeling the fear. And the other thing is a churning in my solar plexus, and a
feeling of an edge there…a feeling that if I go over this edge I will lose
everything and will be lost. And the contradictory thing is that the only peace
I feel is sitting close to that edge. The edge is my limit. It marks the
boundary between the known and the unknown. Besides fear, there’s huge sadness
there.
I am someone who would be considered successful, my
whole life. Yet I was always suffering inside, and the way I addressed that
suffering was to control the outer world, not only by professional success, but
by taking control of my own life, as I thought, by living alone from 1989-1997.
But inside still wasn’t right. I could find no peace by controlling my outer
world, though it did bring me superficial and momentary relief.
Yet I thought by changing my outer environments I
could get to peace. So I ended my seven years of living alone by choosing to
live with a new friend, whom I knew would stretch my capacities and bring me
more into the outer world than the small one in which I felt enclosed at the
time. Around the time this was happening, I changed my professional world by
entering into the Ph.D. program at CIIS.
For some years I been feeling increasing emptiness within, despite the
very competent and articulate and personable facilitator that most people saw
and warmly accepted. This is what was not enough for me. I felt increasingly as
if I was living someone else’s life and not my own.
Both the new living situation and the study have
brought me to the limits of where I’d ever been, inside and out. A mutual
commitment to consistent emotional honesty and presence with my housemate has
demanded an inner flexibility long undeveloped, and needing to be. My
coursework has shattered long-held assumptions and beliefs to the point of
often seeing them inside as debris floating on water. Neither situation is as
yet approaching comfort, but I do feel a solid sense of rightness. Except for a
very few moments when I go into the deep terror that I know to be residual from
my childhood, coloring the present. The result of all this is an inner shift
that feels tectonic in magnitude. Again and again it brings me to that edge
where I know I must be, where there is a semblance of peace, though a grieving
peace. I feel grief for all that has been lost, for all I thought I had, though
none of it was consistently satisfying.
A lot of frameworks and structures that I built up
inside me that seemed solid and that carried me through from a childhood lived
in the midst of unpredictable and violent behaviour have shifted. One of many
possible examples is reading. My mother taught me to read when I was three and
thereby gave me worlds to find myself in when I couldn’t be in her world of
sudden rages and silent angers. Reading sustained me all my life until the two
changes named above. In the past three years I have not been able to live my
life through books because my own life is burgeoning. Even knowing this so
clearly doesn’t diminish the disorienting feeling.
And the fear is deeper than I’ve ever known. The
crumbling inner structures leave me raw and sensitive and often caught in
projecting (blaming) my inner state on things and people around me. I catch
myself often doing this and try to pull back the blaming energy, more often
than not unsuccessfully.
I am in the chaotic moment of trasnformative
learning. Everything I knew before is in question and everything I am. I often
feel on the edge of exploding or falling apart. Something in me is holding on,
though not intentionally, and keeps trying to find myself in old ways and old
settings. This brings pain, sometimes excruciating emotional pain. Sitting at
that inner edge, even with the unknowing of what might be over that edge, is
somehow comforting, as if this is the only place I can be.
My body goes through different expressions of holding
on and letting go: constipation and diarrhea are telling me what’s happening.
Just having taught for two weeks in a Catholic
university setting, I again lived each day there in the strange paradox of
loving the teaching but feeling smothered by the church-focused setting. Such
small belief-framework!
And I loved my large bedroom with phone and bathroom
and all the usual institutional conveniences, but I also fell back into old
patterns of craving chocolate and food in general – what I have come to know as
my armour of protection in dangerous situations and which I almost never
experience in my present living situation.
So- being in the chaotic moment now has brought me to
asking the question I am exploring here. I am at the point of seeing that even
as I pull back in unconscious ways I can’t do it to the same extent I used to
and it does not last. I pray for letting go. I am closer to the awareness of
when I constrict into the past and when I open to what is now a necessity. I
know this: though ruins of my old life are now all that’s visible, I am also
being carried on a strong life current, even if I’m clinging to fallen branches
sometimes. I have no identity here. I don’t know who I am with all these inner
beliefs in ruins. There are moments when it approaches intolerable. And then I
take a small step, a very baby step, and am into the world again, less
fettered.
There is no way but forward, even though forward is
unknown. This is spirit in full force, removing blinders and letting light into
a long dark small place. I long for trust, pray for faith, where neither seems
possible. But I have already come so far, through a long journey of many
transformations and at least with my intellect I can believe I will come
through this one when the larger time, not my small chronological schedule,
brings all things together for the final thrust outward into some birth. Which
is also death…
Writing this story is such an act. The words are
flowing from the current, not from any forethought. Doing so brings me to the
edge again, reassured, but only of change and moving forward..."
First Findings: Spring
Shoots
Several similarities in these four
stories highlight the chaotic moment in transformation. Loss of identity,
resistance, fear of the unknown and unfamiliar, being pulled forward by greater
forces, functioning in the daily outer world while doing so from a different
place than before, ambiguity –these are echoed in all the above accounts of
living through significant life change.
Images occurring throughout the
stories are all from nature: earthquake and seed cracking open (Barbara W.);
chasm (Margaret J.); dry twigs crackling underfoot (Paul G.) and my own images
of tectonic plates shifting and debris floating on water. These images are
pre-reflective, experienced as snapshots of personal inner processes, later
described and verbalized as an essence of some inner experience.
The stories narrated here reflect
transpersonal dimensions of the inner change experience, according to Rosemarie
Anderson’s (1999) definition:
“whenever possible, transpersonal
psychology seeks to delve deeply into the most profound aspects of human
experience, such as mystical and intuitive experiences, personal
transformation, meditative awareness, experiences of wonder and ecstasy, and
alternative states of consciousness.” (p.xxi)
Here, the transpersonal is present
in Barbara’s “everything I believed in was tossed up in the air…inside I didn’t
know who I was anymore” and when Margaret says “I stepped off this world and
was into a space that didn’t have a world to it yet;” and when Paul asks the
questions “is this all there is? Am I to spend my life doing this? Is there
more and where do I find it?” And when I add to theirs “Everything I knew
before is in question and everything I am…the ruins of an old life are all that’s
visible.” In these words we are
announcing the presence of the transpersonal in our very ordinary lives.
All of us have and are stepping
forward into larger lives having lived through the disorientation of the
chaotic moment. Even in these short forms, the more deeply engaged, conscious
lives that emerged from these tumultuous moments are evident.
A Tree in
the Forest:
The Larger
Context
Besides the obvious commonalities
in the stories, there is a body of literature carrying themes of transformation
readily contextualizing what has been shared in the personal stories here
recounted.
Mezirow(2000)
defines transformation as
“a movement through time
of reforming reified structures of meaning by reconstructing dominant
narratives. Learning occurs in one of four ways: by elaborating existing frames
of reference, by learning new frames of reference, by transforming points of
view, or by transforming habits of mind.” (p.19)
Each of us describing the chaotic
moments of our transformations are entering into one or more of these learning
moments. Barbara W. both learned a new frame of reference and transformed a
point of view when she allowed her view of religious life to change radically
from the experience of actually living it. She then learned a new frame of
reference that moved her center of power from an external structure into her
own self. Margaret J. walked the same path when her husband divorced her
without warning, forcing her to learn a new frame of reference – how to survive
– and more than survive – find a completely new life – on her own. In her
description of losing her identity sense in the Arctic, she had to repeat this
learning of a new frame of reference from within, even as she functions
externally from previous knowledge. Her Arctic experience also called her to
surrender old “habits of mind”, and her perception of herself and the
compassionate nature of the universe were completely transformed. Paul G.,
finding himself feeling “dead inside”, allowed both the elaboration of his
existing frame of reference – the institution of the Roman Catholic Church in
which he still serves as priest – and the transformation of “habits of mind”
when he mentioned how he saw people differently; they came to mean more to him.
I myself am in a deeper layer of
all these learning processes. I can identify moments in the past fifteen years
when I have elaborated an existing frame of reference by finding a way to stay
in my religious congregation even while feeling rejected by it, and by
following my inner feelings rather than external measurements regarding my
belonging to the R.C. Church.
I’ve learned new frames of
reference by enrolling in CIIS and by deliberately moving in with a friend
after seven years of living alone. Both these events have caused me to transform
several viewpoints (see my story), and I am presently in the chaos of
transforming “habits of mind” – the most difficult for me thus far.
The stories proclaim that we are
all four engaged in what Robert Kegan (2000) describes as
“a shift away from being
‘made up by’ the values and expectations of one’s ‘surround’ (family, friends,
community, culture) that get uncritically internalized and with which one
becomes identified, towards developing an internal authority that makes choices
about those external values and expectations according to one’’ own
self-authored belief system. One goes from being psychologically ‘‘written by’’
the socializing press to ‘‘writing upon it’, a shift from a socialized to a
self-authoring epistemology.”(p.59)
Pine and Horne (1969) in their
useful outline of adult learning principles, offer two that apply to the
stories told here. They define learning as “change in thinking resulting in
change of behavior”. Their research showed them that adults learn best when “learning is emotional
and intuitive as well as intellectual and rational”, and “Learning is sometimes
a painful process” (p.,3,5). In the burgeoning field called transformative learning
in the West, this realization is named (Mezirow and associates) 2000, but not
as fully explored as is its cognitive, theoretical framework. Yet it is this
chaotic moment, this edge of resistance that fills the body and spirit and
disengages the mind, that determines the transformative outcome.
It is thus important to note that –
just as “many meditational practices induce relaxation but often do not put
victims in touch with their turmoil or how they have internally organized
themselves in order to survive,” (Grant, 2000) the cognitive study of
transformative learning does not necessarily lead to transformation, though the
ideas can serve as catalysts and guideposts to the more holistic transformative
engagement which includes body, emotions and spirit.
Conclusion
So what is the nature of the
chaotic moment in transformation? Its nature is in the soul and beingness of
every person. Its nature is “the dark core”, as Virginia Woolf (1933) calls it,
and as Adrienne Rich (1975) starkly describes:
“The dark core. It is beyond personality; beyond who loves and hates us.
We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness. It is part of
the cycle understood by the old pagan religions, that materialism denies. Out
of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something.
The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and
anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness,
sterility. We have been urged to fill our emptiness with children. We are not
supposed to go down into the darkness of the core.
Yet, if we risk it, the something born out of that nothing is the
beginning of our truth.” (p. 37)
Barbara W., Margaret J., Paul G and
myself have all risked that “nothing”, and we have come into “something”. This
inquiry has helped us name that experience, and has brought me to an unexpected
crossroads: the “reorganization of [my own] consciousness.” (Grant, 1999)
References
Braud, William, and Anderson,
Rosemarie (1998) Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences:
Honoring Human Experience (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing)
Clements, J., Ettling, D., Jenett,
D., Shields, L. (1999) Organic Inquiry: If Research Were Sacred
(Draft Manuscript)
Denis, Margaret and Peddigrew, Brenda
(1995) “Preparing to Facilitate Adult Religious Education” in Adult Religious
Education: A Journey of Faith Development. Ed. By Marie A. Gillen and Maurice
C. Taylor (New Jersey: Paulist Press)
Grant, Robert (1999) The Way of the
Wound: a Spirituality of Trauma and Transformation (self-published)
Mezirow, Jack and associates (2000)
Learning as Transformation: critical perspectives on a theory in progress. (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass)
Pine, G. and Horne, P. “Principles
and Conditions of Adult Learning” in Adult Leadership (Spring, 1969)
Rich, Adrienne (1975) “Women and
Honor: Some Notes on Lying” in Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
(2001) (New York: Norton& Co.)
Brenda Peddigrew holds a Master's Degree in Theology from
Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, MO. She is currently completing a
Ph.D.(Humanities) with a concentration in Transformative Learning and Change
with the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Brenda is a
Transformative Facilitator and educates facilitators in transformative
practices
in North America and Ireland. She is also a writer, poet, gardener and
photographer, finding wilderness in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.