les portes de Portugal

I've been drawn to the doors that separate me from the inner places here in this country.

Sometimes I wonder if any two doors are the same. Sometimes I wonder who or what moves within. I feel inclined, at times, to knock.

Other times, I'm content to wonder, to wander,

to let the hidden places hold their mystery,

to let the door speak, to listen.

Psychotherapy holds the same dynamic for me.

Inside are doors, endless doors, unique thresholds to the Mystery. Time and again I find myself wanting to throw open the passageways - reveal, see, identify, assess, understand, know.

Absurd. Sad.

Science (including Psychology) is the 4 year old constantly asking "why?" Unlike the child, Science has lost touch with its origins in innocence and magic. These qualities have been pressed to the outside, to the fray, to the margins. Science has become a machine, maybe unstoppable in its drive to.... to what? Reveal? Control? Harness? Manipulate?

This week we worked with some techniques in Polarity Therapy (http://www.polaritytherapy.org/). As students, we also participated in a day of Breathwork - a practice as old as time in using the basic element of breathing to deepen experience and invite the Mystery within to move. Not sure how much of my own mystery I want to reveal in this medium but 'moving' captures my experience beautifully. I made contact with other times in this human life and with a primal energy that connects all life forms. I connected into a force of sound and feeling that felt as ancient as the sky.

I move all the time to try and understand myself and others better. It's a practical endeavor as a therapist, a very human habit. All the same, the more I open and see, the clearer it is to me that while patterns exist, Mystery reigns. I'm loosely aware of the devastation that has taken place in Japan in the past few days, prior to that in New Zealand (and countless other places, I'm sure). Certainly there are those who will be grappling with Science to trace the etiology of the Earth's movements. Others who will migrate more towards Religion in hopes of feeling some ground on which to stand in the wake of the death and destruction. It's what we do. We feel moved and we want something to hold onto. We see a door and we want to open it.

The trick is that what I see is coloured by my perspective; the inner sanctum seen through the filter of my inner space. And when I close the door, what lies behind it continues to move, with patterns, with mystery - already altered by the very act of being 'seen.'

And so I've answered my own wondering. No two doors in Portugal are alike.