By Rachel Fleischmann, LCSW, Dance / Movement Therapy Topic Expert Contributor

Click here to contact Rachel and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

“We’re all bozos on the bus,
So we might as well sit back
And enjoy the ride”
~Wavy Gravy

As psychotherapists, we wear many hats; that of thinker, change agent, magician (if only….), loving detective, spiritual guru, compassionate witness, and more. We do everything we can to be consistent, kind and well put-together for our clients. This of course, is in their best interest; they need and deserve a sacred and safe container. We, essentially, are the constant object. We are also human, and prone to error. We need reminders that our human-ness is okay. I am offering some of my favorites.

Elizabeth Lesser, friend, co-founder of the Omega Institute and author of the book Broken Open, tells us, “I believe that we’re all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments–mistake prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world.” She explains;

“Every single person on this bus called Earth hurts; it’s when we have shame about our feelings that hurt turns into suffering. In our shame, we feel outcast, as if there is another bus somewhere, rolling along on a smooth road. Its passengers are all thin, happy, healthy, well-dressed, and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that don’t bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things, or goofy things like forget where they parked their car, lose their wallet or say something totally inappropriate. We long to be on that bus with the other normal people.”

This is what I sometimes feel like in my darker moments as a psychotherapist; a bozo cleverly disguised under a clean blouse and loving demeanor, mustering up all my energy reserves to show up with grace and aplomb, hoping my clients didn’t see me running after the bus, or giving the finger to a loud Harley as I was crossing the street. As I navigate through the challenging landscapes of my career, I know that I must integrate these shadow parts. Even after 15 years of training, licensure in two states, and my role as core faculty at the Omega Institute, I still feel like a bozo on the bus; ill-prepared and highly exposed.

“We are built to make mistakes
Coded for error”
~Lewis Thomas

Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance, offers us relief from this imposter syndrome. She calls it the “trance of unworthiness”, and she invites us to recognize the beliefs and fears that sustain this trance as this can offer us the beginning of freedom. She nudges us with a gentle invitation to take our shadow to tea, to sit with our disowned parts with compassion and notice how they begin to lose their power over our lives. This exercise has been a gift to myself and my clients. No matter what your orientation, you can bring this into your work. As a body-oriented practitioner, I almost feel like I am cheating somehow, because the body never lies, and I can easily access my client’s authentic self.

“After writing poems all day,
I went off to see the moon on the piney hill.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
But the deep part of her house is in darkness.”
~Robert Bly

Robert Bly, poet and author of A Little Book on the Human Shadow, calls this part of us “the long bag we drag behind us”, and describes it this way: behind us we have an invisible bag, and the parts of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents love, put in the bag…. By the time my brother and I were twelve, in Madison, Wisconsin, we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.” Bly tells us “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”

In several of his poems, Jelalludin Rumi speaks of the Open Secret. He says that each one of us is trying to hide a secret. Our pain and fear and longing in the absence of company, become alienation and envy and competition. As we hide our truths from one another, we do each other a grave disservice. As a psychotherapist, I have discovered the power of bringing together both psychological and spiritual principles in the process of healing and growth. I combine my psychological training, with its focus on how we have been wounded in our relations with others and how to go about addressing that, with a spiritual presence, focusing more on what is intrinsically right. In this way, I can embrace my own bozo, take my shadow to tea, and peek into my bag which drags behind me. Only then can I help my clients access the infinite resources at the core of their nature that they can cultivate in order to live more expansively. And only then can I laugh tenderly when I see my silly self show up again and again.

I wish you safe and lovely travels.

Resources

Broken Open – How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow – Elizabeth Lesser

Kitchen Table Wisdom – Rachel Naomi Remen

The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron

The Little Book on the Human Shadow – Robert Bly

Radical Acceptance – Tara Brach

Practicing Peace in Times of War – Pema Chodron

Owning Your Own Shadow – Robert A. Johnson

When they revolutionize the Cocktail Parties
By Marilyn Sandberg
“Hello, what are you afraid of?”
“Death”
“Me too”
“When you hear a Mahler symphony?”
“No, when I wake up in the night.”
“Me too.”
“Nice meeting you.”
“Same here.”

©Copyright 2009 by Rachel Fleischman, LCSW. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Rachel and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile