A continuing practice of reading good therapists is an immeasurably useful way of gaining confidence in your work. For this book I read Jung, Hillman, Winnicott, Laing, Rogers, and Yalom. I restore my skills by consulting books and videos by Rollo May, Fritz Perls, John Tarrant, Ronald Schenk, Robert Sardello, D. W. Winnicott, Rafael López-Pedraza, Patricia Berry, David L. Miller, John Moriarty, and Nor Hall. I keep certain spiritual books at hand: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Tao Te Ching, Black Elk Speaks, Upanishads, Sufi poetry, Jane Hirshfield’s Women in Praise of the Sacred, and my own translation of the gospels. This is a partial list. I could add many poets and writers of fiction.

Therapy is not all focused analysis. Once in a while I reach up to my bookshelf and read a quote or a poem that is relevant to what is being discussed. I may do this because I feel a constriction in our conversation. I feel we need a third voice to join us and allow us to look out further from our restricted space. It also models and teaches how good art and literature can be psychologically useful.

I think I came closer in this session than in many of the previous ones to encouraging the kind of shift I am after for my patients. It did not come through my explanation of the concept of conceit but from the surprise of suggesting that Zach simply be a friend to his friend. The element of surprise was important. Startled by my comment, Zach had a glimpse of another way of relating. It made sense to him in the moment, not just conceptually but personally. The Zen poem connotes a similar feeling, returning by an unused path. Could that also be mindfulness, coming back via an intrinsic but unfamiliar resource to find the unexpected? But when I read the poem to Zach at a later date, instead of hearing “violets,” he heard the final word as “violence.” A Freudian slip, we might conclude.

I have learned that feeling matters, that feeling is an important and legitimate way of knowing. This learning has come most formally through Somatics (particularly the social justice and somatics blend found in generative somatics, through the work of Staci Haines, Spenta Kandawalla, Liu Hoi-man, Lisa Thomas Adeyemo, Chris Lymbertos, Vassilissa Johri, and Richard Strozzi-Heckler), and Robert Gass’s work on the art of transformation now developing and evolving into emergent strategies at the Social Transformation Project under the leadership of Jodie Tonita, Eugene Kim, Idelisse Malave, and others.

What my meditation teachers have shared with me is that meditation is about choosing where my attention goes. Training my attention. And that when I am overcome by sadness, loss, anger, joy, desire, restlessness, or other emotions, it helps to be able to drop into myself and choose—to be with the emotions intentionally, to listen for what is needed. This has been a path into emergent strategy—the more I listen, the more I understand the interconnectedness of the world, and my place in it, my insignificance, my wholeness, our collective potential and beauty.