Gary ~ May 28

 

The Coach Needs Healing Too

 

Eliza was really upset yesterday and looked like she was about to become completely undone before she finally pulled herself together and managed a smile or two, even though the smiles were weak ones and seemed more than a little forced.

 

We were on a Zoom call, with about 7 or 8 other people.  We meet up via Zoom every Monday at 12 noon Eastern time to discuss various issues and aspects of getting old and dying while trying to maintain, and even foster, our deep and abiding sense of fundamental well-being. It is called the Aging and Fundamental Well-Being meet up and is only one of about 50 weekly Zoom meet ups that POK, as our spiritual community is called, offers to its more than 300 active members out of a world-wide total of 1600 (or so it is claimed).

 

At first Eliza would not put on her camera and announced at one point in the meet up, "I'm having a real bad day over here and am not really ready to be seen."  OK, that's fine with us, since there are others on these calls that often feel like not being seen and so they sit there with their camera off, just listening to the proceedings and occasionally jumping in to make a comment or two.  No big deal.  We are used to people not having particularly good days.

 

When Eliza finally did put on her camera I noticed that she really looked really bad and out of sorts and certainly did not appear to be the same Eliza whom I picked up at the Denver International Airport less than 2 weeks ago, and  who I had lunch with and palled around with for over 2 hours at the airport while we waited for Sari and Onnie to arrive so we could drive them to the Chautauqua in Boulder with us. This was not the big, bold, and imposing Eliza who acted in my Shakespeare scene from Twelfth Night, and who wore a "slutty dress" as she described it,  with a big  brown leather neck choker and a thick brown leather wrist band, and who is not about to take any shit from anybody, make no mistake about that.

 

Nor was this the Eliza who DJ'ed our Sunday Night Fever dance party at the Chautauqua and who at one point jumped up and totally belted out a soaring rendition of the Kiki Dee Band's "I've Got The Music In Me," or the take -charge person who helped Sequoia organize and manage our 5 day spiritual retreat that was such a rousing success.

 

No, this Eliza looked like a real mess.  She could hardly talk, she was crying so much.  She finally told us through her many tears and sobs that she felt alone, rejected and abandoned, and that after being with people (that's us, folks) who really dug her, got her, and accepted her totally, to come home to hostile family members and pseudo friends who had no idea who she REALLY was and who didn't seem to dig her her spiritual schtick very  much, to say the least,  was just a little too much for her to take.  She said she needed to find a physical community (and not merely our online one) where she could be among people who were kindred souls, and not merely friendly acquaintances or somewhat hostile family members.

 

The meet up devolved into what I thought was a pointless discussion of our group forming an intentional community where we could live together with  really spiritual people instead of merely ordinary ones, and blah blah blah and yadda yadda yadda.

 

I tuned completely out onf this pie-in-the-sky discussion because we've been down the "intentional community" wouldn't-it-be-nice road more that a few times before over the years, and nothing ever comes from it and nothing, imo, ever will.  It's all airy-fairy wishful thinking silliness and it's never gonna happen, not in my lifetime anyway.

 

Patti, our leader and everybody's favorite person, as well as others, really bent over backwards in their attempt to console Eliza, and support and encourage her,  and in the end, things ended on an upbeat note, as they are prone to do in our weekly Zoom meetups where everybody just wants everybody else to simply be happy and makes lots of spiritual progress at the same time.

 

When I got off the call my wife, who was sitting in her matching recliner across from me in our new living space said, "Holy Shit.  Isn't that the coach who you did that MDMA session with?"  She was surprised that someone who was a spiritual mentor or life coach and who came off as being totally together and totally in charge of the situation could seem so vulnerable, so needy, and so completely bereft.

 

"Well," I said to Anne, "Don't forget, a lot, if not all, therapists and life coaches and spiritual guides go into the business in order to better deal with their own shit and try to heal their own traumas and emotional wounds.   Eliza is probably no different in that regard than any other therapist or life coach."

 

"Physician heal thyself" indeed.