Minding

When I was training to become a psychotherapist, my training supervisor was an older man. A lovely, gentle man, well-regarded in his radical work with children. He taught me so much - it was the feel of him, how he listened, never interfering in my work, respecting it, but 'minding' me as a growing therapist. 'What was your duty of care?' he would ask occasionally. The query brought an inner alignment, a simple focus, that settled me into the real work.

The experience of working with Ron has stayed. His way of guiding was discreet, allowing me to learn as I came to feel the layers beneath the surface. He minded and developed my heart, for this work, and all work. I came to love him - a magic ingredient - when the heart opens and really allows the minding. He did not like the public life and stayed away from the crowd of the psychoanalysts.

To walk to his rooms and indeed away, was through a bushland of native wildflowers. There was no neat concrete path. Don't you love a man who can understand this?

Some of these young ones - people who saw me when he was supervising me - come back. A young woman returned again for a chat. I know this in myself, it is as if she instinctively need to keep alive a thread, with me, but also with a part of her minded self - to remember the space, the bigger hand in her life that guides her.

I listened to a great interview with Claire Keegan recently, where she talked about ‘minding’ (Radio National: Conversations) A beautiful interview. She seems to me a woman intact, living close to herself and her life unfolding. She said that everyone, not just children, but old people, people living with illness, dementia, married women, unmarried people living in relationships, grandmothers, husbands, all humans, needed minding and that it did not matter where love came from as long as it came. She writes so beautifully of this delicate thing, which does not claim or proclaim or barge in, or promise, but arrives quietly, respecting the presence of another life. It does not mean fix, it can mean show, tend, water, feed. It does mean love. It is like the space between two notes, lingering.

I feel this with the inmates too. People run around fixing them, which can be useful for their understanding of their addictions, violence, or whatever they have done.  In time, some come to trust you. How they are treated is what threads them to their spirit, taking them from the external to the internal. This is the beginning of healing.

Our culture has become self-preoccupied, the eyes are down. Busy, so busy. Practicing yoga can connect us again to our bigger/smaller, less significant selves. I think a yoga practice also minds us, keeping us near our values, our singularity in a conforming world.

It is a gift to recognise being 'minded'. The inmates having so little, and so damaged by a harsh life can feel like they are standing in rain, their parched dry soil soaking in the drops...

It's hitting the bottom that let's us need.

Now, in the last week before Christmas everything can feel like a commodity and a strain, yet it is about this minding too, which is why it is so provocative, especially if it is missing. Minding might just be in a card, a cookie given (remembering the film the Quiet Girl), or just a pause in the conversation. All spiritualities call us to minding and to being minded. This is the deepest tenderness, the taste of being 'minded'.

How shocking it is when we enact our projections so brutally onto other lives. Blessings on the hate of Bondi and the love and bravery shown.

To all of you I have taught over the many years, wherever you are, the thread is always there, be blessed, loved and courageous.