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A Journey of Transformation
Mahmud Nestman is the director of the CURA Institute
for Integrated Learning. The uniqueness of his four-day residential
workshops, “Journeys of Transformation”, are what motivated
me to interview him. These workshops are unusual in that there is
no formal agenda or program, each participant is supported to discover
their own path or process of unfolding, and often there is a strong
sense of grace and synchronicity.
Q: Why did you found the CURA Institute?
MN: Cura
is a Latin word meaning “care of the soul”.
I wanted to create an institute that would care for the whole person,
including their soul. I believe that if we take care of our soul
first, the soul with its evolutionary intelligence will care for
the body, mind and feelings. This caring will manifest as purification,
refinement, and balance.
Q: What is the difference between traditional
approaches to counselling and an integrated approach?
MN: Traditional
approaches are primarily and often exclusively verbal. Freud called
psychotherapy “the talking
cure”, as clients
and therapists engage in therapeutic conversations of a verbal
nature. An integrated approach takes into account more than the verbal
-
for example, body-oriented sensations, breathing patterns, essential
rhythms, these kinds of communications – verbal and non-verbal
together.
Q: Can you give me an example of this?
MN: Let’s say you are experiencing a problem in your relationship
with your partner. Something is bothering you, there is something
between the two of you, you’re not quite sure what it is about,
you want to discuss it with him, but you’re unclear and feeling
anxious. So, as you are a spiritually-minded person you deal with
it by attempting to transcend the uncomfortable feelings and focus
on the positives. However, your experience doesn’t shift for
you. When you’re relating with him you still feel tense. And
though you’re doing your best to transcend these feelings and
expand your consciousness, your body is actually contracting and
tensing. Your conscious mind is trying to change to a clear channel
but your deeper mind is registering static. That blocking or conflict
that exists within you, it imprints in your body, imprints in your
muscles, imprints in your tissues, imprints in your cells. Even if
your conscious mind can tune out the difficulty, your body can’t.
And each of us has had experiences of being where we instinctively
and habitually avoid something or hold back from something,
and over time begin to feel a build up of pressure, tension,
numbness
or pain
in our body. And, after a period of time our conscious mind
just can't unravel and let go of this pain even if we want
to. We
are unable to will ourselves past the defenses we have been
reinforcing. However, the body holds the pain, and that pain
can be the doorway
to the meaning of the pain and the release of the pain.
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Q: Can you explain how the pain can be a doorway?
MN: Let’s say, in your case, your tension
manifests most strongly as pain in your stomach. Your deeper mind
is tensing your stomach.
It may be helpful to you if I assist you to focus your attention
on your stomach ache. And as you do that, I notice that you
begin to instinctively massage your stomach with your hand. I ask
you to
continue to pay attention to the ache in your stomach as
you massage it in just the way that feels right to you, and as
you stay with
this process there is a strong possibility that images, words,
feelings and eventually insight and meaning will emerge in your
consciousness.
For instance, perhaps the first awareness that emerges is
a concern that your partner no longer loves you. The next awarenesses
are of
a series of experiences that have led to this concern. Then,
after that, a constellation of fears emerge – fear that your
concern is true, fear of being abandoned and being alone, fear
of discussing
your concern with him. As you uncover these awarenesses and
discuss them with me, you experience a shift. You feel relief and
your stomach
ache has dissipated. You are still experiencing some fear
and anxiety but you have gained clarity and grounding and some
direction. So
by going into the darkness, you experience an illumination
of what was lurking in the shadows of your mind. And your conscious
mind
was being supported by me to do something other than analyze,
rationalize or even try to transcend. It was being assisted to
do something which
is atypical for most of us, yet completely natural – pay
attention to the uncomfortable sensations or communications
of the body.
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Q: That sounds quite remarkable. Does your therapy always
proceed so quickly and smoothly?
MN: No. First of all, clients need to feel safe and trusting.
At the beginning, my intention is to foster a climate where
the client
can feel free to be present, to show up. And think about
it – how
many of us really show up in our interactions with others? Are
we willing to be transparent and honest unless we feel safe and
trusting
in the presence of the other?
Q: How do you create that safety in therapy and in your
workshops?
MN: My intention is to be present in ways that blend
spirituality and clinical skills. First of all, to have
a relaxed attentiveness
and a trust in the possibility of a natural process of
unfolding. If I can sit with my client without an agenda,
without trying
to predict what is going to happen, yet paying attention
to what is
happening – now! – in the present moment, with a sincere
interest in the unique person with whom I’m with, and an attitude
of acceptance and compassion towards all facets of that person – their
resistance as well as their openness – then I feel that
I am doing what I can to help create a space for my client.
Q: Does empathy help to create safety for the client?
MN: Yes…definitely. Empathy is understanding what someone else
is experiencing and expressing and then communicating our understanding
of their sharing back to them. It is important that we are understood
in our uniqueness – our way of seeing life, our ways of thinking,
feeling, behaving. As therapist, my intention is to see the person
as fully as I can, in the way they are bringing themselves forward – discovering
the unique design of each person with whom I work, not trying to
fit them into a limiting category of who I want them to be. This
is a challenging yet essential intention for me to have as a therapist.
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Q: In your program you have integrated spirituality with counselling.
Why is that important to you?
MN: I see living life as a spiritual process. You might say that
life is a process of learning about and engaging with spirits.
Each of us has within us a variety of forces, energies, urges,
desires,
motivations, etc. They cannot be identified with material or scientific
technology, but can anyone deny the existence of desires and longings
and urges? These are invisible energies or spirits which are very
real to all of us. All of us are primarily concerned, consciously
or unconsciously, with doing the best we can to sort out, make
sense of, integrate, and live life with all the different inner
forces
or spirits active within us. At the same time, we are doing our best
to deal with the forces and spirits of others. For me, the intent
of counselling is to support individuals to pay attention to and
learn how to manage their biggest and most challenging project – their
self. My friend, the playwright Lucas Foss, wrote a play called “Little
Voices” which is about a man’s process and struggle with
two inner voices – one voice which values comfort and addiction,
and another which values spiritual growth. Sometimes our inner community
of spirits communicates through our internal dialogue – or
to say it simpler – through talking to ourselves. So which
voice or energy do we listen to and follow in all of the differing
situations of our life? How do we navigate through this inner and
outer sea of spirits, which are often at odds with one another? Individuals
come to counselling when they are unable to sort out their inner
dynamics on their own.
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Q: How do you work with invisible spirits or energies? How do
you help clients sort out these inner realities?
MN: I believe that the deepest most fundamental energy within
us is naturally programmed to guide us to a state of harmony
within
our self, with others and with that which is beyond us yet closest
to us – call it God, the Creator, our Higher Power, etc. Our
greatest pain is our separation from that state of being. When our
pain or our soul-longing is strong enough and we are in a setting
where we feel safe and trusting and sense that there is a real possibility
that we will be supported to surrender to our deepest longing, our
soul begins to make its presence known. One way in which this invisible
energy manifests visibly is through rhythm, and rhythmic shifts begin
to emerge. These are unconscious and spontaneous movements – swaying,
rocking, twitching, shaking, placing a hand on an area of tension
or discomfort, which begin to happen on their own, sometimes very
subtle, often times more obvious. For me, these are rhythms of the
soul, and I do the best I can to support my clients with these rhythms – to
use what I have learned as a therapist and as someone attempting
to follow my own soulful rhythms – to encourage them to surrender
to the ebb and flow of their own natural rhythms with trust and courage
and patience. Through this process I have seen many individuals come
to a place of centeredness, peace and understanding. Often, of course,
this process takes us through fear and suffering before we arrive
at our center.
Q: I have some questions about your four-day residential workshops.
First of all, why do you organize them?
MN: I believe that at times, we need an intense concentration
of a certain kind of energy in order to make quantum shifts.
These
workshops are similar to going on a heroic journey. We leave
the city and our
ordinary reality and travel to a fresh place – where we open
to the possibility of creating an extraordinary reality. As a group
we gather our time, attention and intention together and create a
container where with the help of grace we both allow and generate
a transformational process to grow which is intense, playful, creative,
heartfelt and soulful.
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Q: I have heard that there is no agenda in your workshop and
yet each individual is strongly supported by the group. How
does this
occur?
MN: No one has to do anything they don’t want to do. There
are no shoulds, no exercises or particular ways people have to act.
The group and I and my assistants, together, offer our attention,
deep listening, suspended judgements, faith, caring, and forgiveness
to one another. This may sound exceptional, and it is, yet it isn’t.
We all have these inner resources, and most of us yearn to relate
to one another in such ways. With modeling, encouragement and appreciation,
these qualities blossom. In this kind of environment, individuals
feel safe enough to step out and feel free to come forth in ways
which are authentic and real for them. This is not always a clear
cut and smooth process. At times it is difficult for individuals
to welcome and open to what is emerging for them. To paraphrase the
poet David Whyte – it seems impossible that the stone can be
rolled away from the tomb of longing. But we’re willing to
stay with the process and muddle through together, and sometimes
it feels like the helping hand of grace guides us through.
As individuals are supported to do their work in ways that
feel right for them, faith in this process and in one another
grows
and strengthens
as the workshop goes on.
Q: In your brochure you state that a feature
of the workshop is “working
with sensitivity on the edge between conscious and unconscious awareness”.
What do you mean by that?
MN: None of us really know what our next step is in our
own process of growth. If we did it wouldn’t be the next step. It would
already be present, so our next step is always unknown. That means
that we have to move from the known to the unknown and through the
unknown to the next known. And we can’t get there in a solely
cognitive way. We have to take the experiential plunge. So my task
as a therapist is to assist workshop participants with this process.
And neither them nor I know how they are going to move through this
process. But I work with them on the edge of their known conscious
awareness and their wanting-to-emerge unconscious awareness. I want
to work with them in a way that is encouraging without forcing and
above all I want to pay attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding
of their process on the boundary or edge between their conscious
and unconscious experience. That edge is filled with such phenomena
as fear, excitement, confusion, emptiness, deadness, pain, and the
body-rhythms that I mentioned earlier. These are forms of communication
that manifest as we journey toward our center.
Q: I am getting a sense of why these workshops are called
Journeys of Transformation.
MN: The blend of my work and modeling, the heartfelt
and skillful support of my assistants and the group,
and the
strong commitment
of each person to open to the guidance of their own process
leads the group through the desert to the oasis.
Vancouver & Langley Offices
T: 604.733.3343
E: mahmudn@telus.net
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