Suddenly I discover that I've nearly missed the copy deadline for the May issue of the Nimbin Good Times newspaper. Suddenly I realize that the month of April is coming to an end. What a very strange time this has been. I went to Perth for a fortnight's holiday and lots of lovely snorkeling in the Indian Ocean and actually missed my flight home, thinking my flight was scheduled for Saturday when it was meant to be Friday. I, for the first time in my life, had to rebook a flight. Yikes! I flew on Sunday night, and arrived on the Gold Coast on Monday morning and resumed working on Tuesday.
I'd gone to Perth for a much needed break. It had been a whole year since my last one and, frankly, I was exhausted. The floods here in Lismore broke my heart. True, I was not directly affected, living and working as I do in the hills above the cbd, but some people lost their houses and their businesses and that affected me because of my caring of them.
I heard the calling for counsellors, but I knew I was not in any fit state to offer my assistance beyond what I was already doing. I continued, after all, seeing my clients between the floods and afterwards. I just knew there wasn't more in the tank, as it were. In aircraft problems, we are told to attend to our own oxygen needs before attending to those people around us. We cannot help anybody if we are starved of oxygen. This is true for those of us in the helping professions. We cannot help others unless we are ourselves are ok. There is nothing intrinsically selfish here. We all matter.
I remember seeing a well trained naturopath some years ago who didn't feel worthy enough to work in her field. She cared, as she said, too much for her potential clients and not enough for herself. I only did one session with her, which was all that was needed. We did a powerful Tibetan meditation called Tonglen together. This is a meditation for loving compassion towards others and self. The central message is that all of us matter, all of us. There is no one excluded in this act of compassion. Tonglen consists of breathing in universal love and breathing out this love for self and other. I was delighted to find that this client went on to open a very successful clinical practice. She has since moved away from the district.
We cannot work beyond our capacities. There is only just so much that we can offer others before our inner resources are exhausted. Kindness to self means we can continue to offer kindness to others. Now this doesn't mean too much self indulgence. We do need to balance our own needs with needs of others. We do need to be honest to self and others, and self reflective. If someone is not honest with us, we need to speak up, but in a manner that isn't designed to hurt them. We need, I think, to understand our own motivations in our communications with others. Again, the Tibetan meditation is useful here. We, individually, are within the human community. Our actions need to be clear and non-manipulative. We cannot force our help upon others, and neither should we force our agendas on others. Self knowledge is integral to self care, I'm suggesting. Such knowledge is incremental throughout life. We learn about ourselves as we learn about others and each lesson learned is subject to change over time.
The beauty of counselling and psychotherapy is that we come to know our strengths and our limits to the expression of these strengths and thereby find ways to nurture ourselves in environments that bring us joy and healing. I have a passion, as many people know, for swimming and snorkeling in the sea. My perfect holiday is doing just this. I forgot the date of my flight home because I was busy gliding through turquoise waters, but I'm here now, and ready to listen to anyone wanting to talk.
