Driving Home from Ottawa

Monday, June 22nd

A rich and full weekend is behind me.
What a privilege to stay with too highly successful Journey practitioners, Don and Marie-Sylvie, both psychotherapists who have both adopted the Journeywork into their practice.

Marie Sylvie didn't take part in our NAJPA weekend, because she was participating in a shaman training, a healing practice she was speaking about with highest praise. She had also just returned from a Journey event for a native American Indian tribe further north in Canada. A community that has an extraordinarily high suicide rate, where sexual abuse among children and teenagers is at a rampant 90%, and alcoholism has dissolved much of the foundation of the social fabric. They had a translator there who had to translate the work into "inu", their native language. It was a four day workshop, held for the entire tribe. The chief who had asked for the Journeywork to be introduced to his people had also just before banned all alcohol from coming into the community, so the upheaval was enormous and the anger was palpable, but in the end the transformation, the way she described it, was stunning.

It was an inspiration and a gift to experience this weekend from the vantage point of their lives... and to see such a different approach to working with clients, as they have pretty much maintained their schedule of one hour sessions and don't often go beyond that. The most they will schedule is a two hour session with a client. So there is not that long intensity of a process that tries to clean up everything that presents itself at once, but there is a more gradual, a more continuous and a more ongoing rhythm to the work... and that seems to serve their clients more than these big "all packed up in one" processes that take a long time to digest and have less of a continuity. Bob Levy, who presented at the weekend has the same approach. He sees clients for short amounts of time and his practice is overflowing. He is also a very gifted speaker and he gives a lot of intro talks. That's how he attracted all the people into his practice. He only completed the accreditation two years ago and he has already become a new presenter for the Journey Intensive Weekends. I understand why they picked him. His example is so very inspiring - very different, but very inspiring. I will have to restructure the way I do my work from the ground up, redefine my whole approach, including my follow up system, and my intake with people. Hmm, a lot to think about, a lot to digest, a lot of inspiration.