Heather Conn Blogs

                                                                                Front row, from left: Barb, Bob, Heather
                                                                                Back row: Sandra, Robyn; missing: Eva 

After nine days of deep transformational inner work, tears, and a sense of renewed joy, I completed a powerful workshop last month called The Journey Within.

 

The experience, offered free through the employment centre in Sechelt, BC, far surpassed my expectations. A local job counsellor had recommended it, saying that it went “very deep” and that I was free to drop out at any time. That sounded intriguing. I figured that I would probably leave after a few days, hearing the usual suggestions about aligning your passions with your work, a goal which I’ve already embraced. (Yes, my ego has it all figured out. Ha.)

 

Gee, was I wrong. Under the loving guidance and openness of facilitator Bet Diening-Weatherston, our group received high-impact guided visualizations, inspirational prompts, and a safe, supportive atmosphere to reach into the darkest places of our subconscious. What a ride it was. Ten of us began, and five of us finished, having developed a visceral bond that comes from sharing one’s stories of pain, new insights, and vulnerability.

 

We received carefully worded scripts, which incorporate concepts of neuro-linguistic programming, and worked in pairs to address limiting beliefs in our subconscious. These exercises, done with rotating partners,  helped to heal relationships and destructive habits by replacing old inner dialogue and “tapes” with new images and loving words. This interactive process allowed me to make surprising connections between childhood events and adult beliefs and to access long-buried memories. Overall, this allowed a grand reawakening to my deeper Self, the part easily minimized by my impatient ego as impractical and too abstract.

                                                   From left: Debbie, an assistant facilitator, Barb, and Bet

 The entire workshop was focused on emotional wellness and healing, targeting what blocks lie beneath our thoughts and actions and how they link to buried feelings. It felt scary but also remarkably freeing to share myself with new emotional clarity and truth. My heart ached throughout the sessions, even when I was helping others access their pain. This reinforced my sense of interconnectedness and how we all bear deep love and hurt from our  human experience. By releasing my own suffering, I found a clearer path to compassion and forgiveness.

 

On the last day, we spontaneously voiced love and appreciation to each person, one at a time,  and offered an example of our gifts or talents to the whole group. I was moved by the praise received and by witnessing the new lightness in our faces. Robyn passed around a bowl of cherries, accompanied by a poem that she wrote called Ode to Cherries. Here’s an excerpt:

Life is a bounty
   and it is up to each one of us
  to most effectively deal with the pits. . .

Some pits I like
an alluvial pit - studded with corundum
the blues and reds of sapphires and rubies
or tourmaline in watermelon pinks to greens

pitch of a tree aging thousands of years
to become amber with insects frozen in time
a pitch black night reminding me
how insignificant I am on this planet earth

Other pits are notable
for their lengthy stay in my space
old vows no longer suitable
spaces and places ready for bounty and light

So take the pits along
with the sweeet bounty of life
embrace them  release them
leaving love passion
and your radiant light.

May we be reminded to
show up for ourselves and lead the way . . .

Bless the Journey as we weave
our tapestry of Life

Thank you to Bet, Debbie, Barb, Robyn, Sandra, Eva, and Bob for your courage and willingness to open your hearts and share your light and love with me and all of us. It was a wonderful experience.

Mudito Drope, an artist in Gibsons, BC, recently asked me if I wanted to pose for a colour portrait. Flattered, I said, “Sure.” When I asked: “Why me?” she replied: “You have an interesting face.” (That’s better than what one ex-boyfriend told me: that I had an “unfinished face.”  I’m still not sure what he meant by that, but I’ve never forgotten the term.)

While posing in Mudito’s studio, I thought it would be tough to remain in the same position, but it wasn’t. I treated the exercise like an open-eyed meditation and had no problem lasting longer than Mudito’s suggested 20-minute increments. The time from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with a break for lunch, went by really quickly.

 

For some of that time, we listened to a tape of Bill Moyers interviewing Karen Armstrong about the societal need for compassion and tolerance, and about the Charter for Compassion, which Armstrong helped to forge. The charter states: “We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world.” It also declares:

“Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.”

The charter ends with this: “Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.”

I found Moyers’ and Armstrong’s conversation inspirational and easy to absorb while staying still. During my sit, a crow landed on a branch close to the studio window and a pesky flicker tapped away at the outside wall of Mudito’s wooden, board-and-batten home.

 

By the time that I left at about 1:30, Mudito hadn’t finished the portrait, but was well through it. I thought that I looked severe and sad in it, but it definitely looked like me. Besides, I was feeling sad that day, concerned about my father, who was in the hospital with a number of serious medical issues.

It was intriguing to watch Mudito in her focused process and to see the colour palette that she uses on faces when doing portraits. On some of her paintings of people, she includes a phrase, an idea that I love. I suggested that she use “Bring a voice to what lies hidden,” which has been a creative theme for me for years and fuels my current memoir writing and SoulCollage work.

 

Mudito now has her first solo exhbition of portraits at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, which will be on display until May 31. Check them out and enjoy.

This week, I felt inspired by The Friendship Village, a powerful film of peace and compassion, written, directed and produced by Vancouver, B.C.-based documentary filmmaker Michelle Mason. She told a small crowd at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt, BC how early, gruesome images of the Rwanda massacre, which she saw while doing a journalism internship at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news bureau in London, Eng., completely altered her career goals and life direction.

 

“I didn’t want to be a bystander,” she said. “I didn’t want to bear witness. I wanted to show stories about people who stand up for things they believe in.”

 

It took different wars to catalyze their unique visions of peace, compassion, and committed action, but shared heartfelt goals brought Mason and the late George Mizo together in her poignant film The Friendship Village. The 2002 documentary reveals how Mizo, a former artillery sergeant in the Vietnam War, became an ardent peace activist, suffered through the effects of Agent Orange, and ultimately founded a school, clinic, and housing  in Vietnam  — The Friendship Village — for children and war vets in that country who had illnesses or deformities resulting from Agent Orange.

 

 ”Those of us who have seen firsthand that horror called war know how fragile life is, and how precious life is, and know that war is not the answer but part of the problem,” Mizo said during the opening ceremony of The Friendship Village in 1998.

 

The village, built in a former rice paddy 11 kilometres from Hanoi, provides medical care, education, meals, and rehabilitation for 120 children. The centre offers pediatric service for outpatients and Vietnamese war vets can stay for up to six months. A recent addition is a new building to address the needs of children with severe handicaps. The village has an organic vegetable and medicinal herb garden, water treatment facility, fish ponds, and fruit trees. The goal is to make the centre completely self-sufficient.

 

Mizo was one of four Vietnam vets who protested the war by waging a 47-day hunger strike, which prompted hundreds of supporters to join them. He received 10,000 letters a day.

 

It was difficult to see and hear the impact that the U.S. spraying of 72 million litres of Agent Orange (made by Monsanto, by the way) during the Vietnam War has had on generations of veterans and children. Babies with enlarged heads, the result of hydrocephalus. Children with twisted or missing limbs. Vietnamese war vets with horrible rashes and giant, pimple-like growths all over their chest.  

 

Mizo’s own immune system was hugely compromised by Agent Orange, rendering him vulnerable to any infection. His symptoms began with a fever, rash, and delerium. He had two heart attacks and suffered constant joint pain. The U.S. denied him medical coverage as a war veteran because of his high-profile peace activism.

 

“I was told it [Agent Orange] was mosquite repellent. Don’t worry about it,” Mizo says in the film.

 

The film states that more than one million children in Vietnam have been born with birth defects as a result of Agent Orange. Experts expect that it will take between 500 and 600 years for the dioxin from this deadly herbicide to dissipate in Vietnam. One remote village on the Ho Chi Minh trail, which received some of the heaviest spraying, is considered one of the most toxic places on the planet due to the high levels of dioxin that remain in the area’s soil.

 

One of the most moving parts of the film for me was learning of the friendship and reconciliation between Mizo and Vietnamese General Tra Van Quang. The four-star general became Mizo’s ally in fund-raising efforts for The Friendship Centre. Decades earlier, during the Vietnam war, the same general led the attack on Que Son (also spelled KheSan) that wiped out all of Mizo’s platoon. Mizo was the sole survivor of his unit simply because he had been previously air-lifted out following his wounding in battle.

 

Mizo received the Vietnamese Peace Medal. General Van Quang told Mizo’s son Michael: “Never go to war.”

 

Mason says that it took a year to convince Mizo to be the subject of her film, since he is such a private person. But since he knew that he wasn’t going to live long (he died the same year that the film came out), he wanted to share his message with a larger audience.

 

“Hope is an illusion,” he says in the film. “You have to actively work it.”

 

An international body of eight support groups raises funds for The FriendshipVillage through grassroots efforts. Carol Stewart, a Sunshine Coast resident who hosted the film screening and Mason’s appearance, has represented Canada on the village’s committee.

 

As Mizo says in the film with characteristic humility: “We can make a difference in life.”

 

For more information on this project that heals the wounds of war, see The Friendship Village.

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Mason’s movie The Friendship Village reminded me of another compelling documentary that responds to war with a message of peace and forgiveness. In Regret to Inform, director, writer, producer Barbara Sonneborn sets out to return to the same valley in Vietnam where her husband was killed 20 years earlier. A female Vietnamese, a former war leader in the same region where the filmmaker’s husband died, shows Sonneborn where his unit was located. The filmmaker wonders aloud if the military command of this same woman could have resulted in her husband’s death.

 

Rather than focus on recrimination and bitterness, Regret to Inform interviews war widows from both the U.S. and Vietnam and reinforces a message of peace. It is a moving personal account narrated and shot with poetic lyricism. Even though this was her first film, Sonneborn appears to draw on her expertise as a set designer; the film’s rich visual appeal seems more a result of magic realism than mere cinematography. The documentary’s poetic sensitivity makes it feel far more like an in-depth read of a wrenching journal rather than a detached journalistic account. I can’t remotely  imagine the pain that Sonneborn experienced when she received in the mail a tape cassette sent by her husband from the field, in which he speaks to her with love and candor. It arrived days after she received the knock on her door, at age 24, and learned that he was dead.

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”

                                                                                     — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Such simple wisdom in this powerful statement, yet how elusive this approach seems on the broader, human scale.

 

Not only brilliant but wise, Albert Einstein was an active humanitarian with a reputation for compassion. When he was living in Princeton, working at the Institute of Advanced Study, people from around the world wrote to him asking for advice about their personal problems. (If he was around today, TV producers would probably hound him to host a talk show called something like “Dr. Al” or maybe just “Albert.”)

 

A rabbi wrote to Einstein,  saying that he could not console his 19-year-old daughter after her sixteen-year-old sister died. Einsteen sent him this reply:

 

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “the Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

 

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security.”

 

I don’t know if the rabbi found these words comforting, but I love them. I’ve had this quote  on my bulletin board for probably 20 years. It’s easy to grow preoccupied with our own daily struggles, forgetting that we are all part of a whole far more vast than our sense of “I.” It makes me think of the phrase “the One and the many,” a term used in SoulCollage, a process that I facilitate in creative workshops. Find out more on my website www.sunshinecoastsoulcollage.ca.

We focus so often on world peace without realizing that it begins inside each of us. As a sticker says on the outside of my daytimer: “Begin within.”  Here are a few books that I recommend:

• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
• Peace Begins with Me by Ted Kuntz (his website is www.peacebeginswithme.ca)
• The Tao of Peace by Diane Dreher
• Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness by Marc Barasch

Nov. 2, 2009

I encourage you to check out the organization Compassionate Action Network if you want to align with others who share a vision for a compassionate world. There is also the non-profit group Charter for Compassion, which is releasing a global charter for compassion on Nov. 12.

I love that the latter group uses the Moibus strip (figure eight sign for infinity) as its logo. To me, this image reinforces the innate connectedness of all life and the timelessness of eternity. My husband and I used this image during the Celtic hand-fasting ceremony at our wedding. We had a knotted cord draped over our wrists in the shape of the Moibus strip to symbolize our union and  “a continuum that passes from the known to the unknown and forms balanced order.”

The right half of the infinity sign is associated with the male or solar principle, the left half with the female or lunar principle. Hence, it represents the harmonious union of two opposite principles.

The Dalai Lama Centre, started by the Dalai Lama’s dear friend Victor Chan in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is another great source for material on compassionate thought and sharing.