Day 12 of the Australian Journey 2012

Today I was more accepting of my lack of status as a pedestrian while I took my morning run.   To show the difference in perception, I mentioned to my Australian hosts that the law of the sea gives the right of way to the slowest vessel.   They were aghast.   How could that be possible?!?   The right of way should go to the fastest vessel, and that's how they drive on land also.

Today we did another inipi ceremony (a.k.a., sweat lodge) for our Mission Australia hosts.   Two locals joined us who had spent substantial time on the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota and knew many songs.   They tended fire for us and carried stones, and the lodge sat on land they leased to be able to run regular ceremonies.   We really appreciated their help and to know about the Lakota-Sydney connection in which Lakota elders regularly came to teach in Sydney and Sydney-ites went to visit the elders in South Dakota.

Another thought came to me today -- culture exchange is different from cultural tourism.   In cultural exchange, each culture has something to offer the other.   In our coming here to do culture exchange, we gave as much as we received.   The local aboriginal people enjoyed participating in our culture as much as we enjoyed participating in theirs.   To my surprise, now, I know more about local aboriginal practices that many Australian I meet.   Like people in the States, they look for the exotic (our current spirituality du jour is Peruvian and ayahuasca) and ignore the richness of practice happening all around them.

The remainder of the day focused on Mission Australia with a fitting ending of listening to our host, Phil, play a mean lead guitar at open mike night at a local restaurant/bar in Manly.   The humor began when we heard it referred to as a Manly gig. Therefore what I want to discuss next is what I learned about the excellent work that they do.

First we heard about the Catalyst-Clemente program, which offers a model of how university education can become accessible to disadvantaged people.   It uses higher education in the humanities, delivered in a community setting, to engage with people who are disadvantaged and would not otherwise receive this education.   It involves a partnership between a university, community organizations, and a range of external supporters.   The subjects taught are fully accredited by the university and are in areas such as history, literature, ethics, and art.   The basic requirements for participants are a willingness to learn, a willingness to commit to a 12 week program, a literacy level that is sufficient to read a newspaper, and some stability in their lives.

To my surprise the origins of this program lie in the USA where New York journalist and social commentator, Earl Shorris, began the Clemente program in 1997.   Its philosophy is that tertiary-level education in the humanities can assist socially disadvantaged/marginalized people to think about and reflect upon the world in which they live.   In turn, this intellectual engagement can promote a broader re-engagement with society, activity with other people at every level, and assist them to exit from the cycle of poverty.   (See Earl Shorris, Riches for the Poor: the Clemente Course in the Humanities,published in 2000 by W.W. Norton and Co. in New York City).   "Students learn to view themselves in terms of their intellectual and personal capacities, to see themselves not as victims, but as agents.   Mission Australia is running this program in conjunction with Australia Catholic University.   I thought, this is something my institution, Union Institute & University, could consider doing in partnership with other community agencies.

This program is being researched around the world.   Mission Australia conducted a pilot student into the impact of the program on re-engaging homeless people in inner city Sydney.   Results were positive, showing increased student self-esteem and autonomy (Yashin-Shaw, I., Howard, P., & Butcher, J. (2005).   Educating disaffected adult learners: Re-engaging the homeless through tertiary level humanities studies in Vocational Learning: Transitions, interrelationships, partners, and sustainable futures. Proceedings of the 13^thAnnual International Conference on Post-Compulsory Education and Training, Brisbane, Australian Academic Press).   Following this pilot study, Mission Australia, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and the Australian Catholic University (ACU National) carried out a second phase of research into the benefits of this program.   They ran three Catalyst-Clemente courses (as they named them) simultaneously in Sydney and in Brisbane.   An art history course was taught at Mission Australia Centre including a visit to the New South Wales Art Gallery and a couple walking tours of the city.   A practical art class was taught in Brisbane including an exhibition with other ACU National students of the artwork created during the course.   A literature and drama course was taught at Vincentian Villege in Sydney, including students performing a play and attending a production of Shakespear's The Tempest at the Sydney Opera House with other ACU National students.   Over half of the students successfully completed the courses, which was extraordinary given their disadvantaged backgrounds.   The students' descriptions of how the course changed their lives are moving and can be found on the Mission Australia website athttp://www.missionaustralia.com.au and in their publication, Enhancing participation: New possibilities for disadvantaged Australians.   The work was especially interesting to us in relation to a small pilot project we did of teaching homeless people with HIV/AIDS (and mental health issues and substance use problems) in New York City how to give Reiki energy healing treatments to one another.   The effect was one of empowerment and building a sense of agency -- pride that they had something to offer other people.   Even staff members at the facility where we encountered them would ask some of them for a Reiki session.   We published this study in the Permanente Journal in 2011.   Encountering this program at Mission Australia has given me more ideas for how to empower our population in Vermont, some of whom are homeless, and many of whom suffer chronically from any number of problems.   (I've noticed that people who have psychological suffering invariably have "physical" suffering.   The division of psychology and body is artificial and for academic purposes but perhaps compromises care.   Almost all of our patients with what we call "complicated minds", because they like the term and don't feel it is pejorative, also have chronic back pain, chronic neck pain, neuropathic pain.   Some have diabetes.   Many have asthma.   Some have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.   Almost all have difficulty sleeping, and many have arthritis, hypertension, heart disease, and more.   The list is endless.   Because we do both medicine and psychiatry, we are addressing the whole person and that's a lot to handle.   I thought how wonderful it would be if our population had a Catalyst-Clemente Program.   Currently they can't access the courses offered through Community College of Vermont because the tuition is beyond their means (about $500 per three credit course).   Also, paralleling the findings of Mission Australia, going to CCV is not necessarily friendly for them.   They're not familiar or comfortable with a school environment.   Classes are often larger than 8 to 15 people.   They don't necessarily have a case manager who can support their non-educational needs to whom learning partners and the course instructors can turn for support.   They don't have IT support or access to computers or knowledge about how to use computers.   Mission Australia provided all this in an integrated, delivery environment in which the students felt comfortable.   This is what I do not see us doing in Vermont, at least, not yet.

The other project about which we heard much was "The Michael Project", conducted by Mission Australia in collaboration with Murdoch University.   "The Michael Project combines homeless and accommodation services, assertive case management, and eleven specialist allied health and support services."   I is a three year, private donor funded project, working with homeless men in the Sydney area.   It provides homeless/accommodation services, ranging from mobile, street-based outreach, through to emergency, short-term, and medium-term accommodation.   Case management involved frequent contact and integrated support.   The specialists involved included dentist, podiatrist, psychologist, drug and alcohol counselor, recreation therapist, barber, occupational therapist, reading and math teacher, computer consultant, and two street-based aboriginal health outreach workers.    The Michael Project reduced the percent of "rough sleepers" (no shelter) from 27.4% to 3.3%.   The percent of people accommodated rose from 27.8% to 93.9%.   The percent in temporary shelter (caravan, boarding house, etc.) felt from 20.7% to 0.8%.   The percent in hospital or prison fell from 15.2% to 0.8%.   This had to be cost-effective!   They are well on their way to publishing their Wave 2 results, which I hope to receive soon.

As part of the Michael Project, homeless people were surveyed to learn more about their situation and how they came to be that way.   The researchers found that sleeping rough is common with the mean length ranging from 1.5 years to 4 years.   The prevalence of mental health conditions and substance use was at least 20 times higher than those of the overall Australian male population.   To their surprise, half of the people had held a full-time job in the last 2 years.   Of course, poverty was overwhelming.   A majority had children, but lacked supportive family members and friends, which contributed to their social isolation, as did their lack of paid work, money, access to transportation, and poor health.   Quality of life was low compared to overall Australians, particularly in terms of social relationships and living environment.   High levels of health service use and contact with the criminal justice system were found.   Ninety-five percent of the participants had experienced one or more traumatic events, which is not surprising considering that people who are diagnosed with psychosis are about 50 times more likely to have experienced traumatic events than the general population (see my blog about the Hearing Voices conference on Day 3 and 4).   I'll also be very interested to read about the cost-effectiveness study that is being conducted.

That completed our day.   Tomorrow we will interact with Child and Youth Initiative (CYI workers) about how increasing narrative competence can improve their work with youth.   Particularly, I believe almost every adolescent male in today's culture is looking for some type of heroic role to perform.   Everyone wants to be heroic and to be seen as a hero.   But, how?   Sometimes anti-heroes are easier to perform than socially acceptable heroes.   And, sometimes, adolescents notion of hero does not match that of adults.   More about that tomorrow.

Day 11 of the Australian Journey 2012

Today we interacted with Mission Australia in Sydney, but first, I awoke early and went running down Manly Rd. through 3 km of forest.   A sign read, "Wildlife", but I only saw road kill -- a possum, a snake, and a rat.   Australian drivers (Melbourne, Sydney, and Gippsland is my sample space) never slow down, not for pedestrians, not for other cars, not for bicycles, not for wildlife.   I discovered that Sydney bicyclists at 6 am on a Saturday morning were just as ruthless.   Well decked with racing togs, they aimed straight at me and gave no ground along the shoulder of the road.   I had to step aside into the bush or they would have mowed me down.   Imagine two headlights coming straight at you on the shoulder of the road.   What's that care doing, driving on the shoulder?   Is it some crazy man trying to kill me?   No, as it gets closer, I realize it's two bicycles riding parallel with no intention of sharing the shoulder of the road with me despite catching me in their high beam headlights.   Luckily, unlike the wildlife, I survived Manly Road, though perhaps more ignobly than manly, and returned to the house where we were staying in time to shower and pile into the Subaru SUV to make the journey into downtown.

Mission Australia was amazing!   I can't begin to say enough about their services and commitment to the homeless and the poor!   They provide programming and shelter for homeless adolescents and adults.   People come for an initial period of 3 months.   Some then transition to other spaces and others continue to stay.   Detox used to take place in the basement, but it has moved to another building.   Adolescents and actually anyone who lives in the vicinity can take advantage of the many programs offered.   They can access a center to help them find employment.   They can get dental and medical care free.   They can use the computers and the internet.   They can take yoga.   They can access a number of offerings about the practicalities of life including managing a bank account, playing chess, taking martial arts, writing a resume, and more.   They can take college courses through Australia Catholic University's Catalyst Program.   On the bulletin board were notices for Intro to Sociology, Intro to Art, Drawing 1, Graphics Art, and more.   We entered the building through the art studio which was massive and full of amazing work.   I learned that people entered the building as prostitutes and emerged as artists!   Their work lined the walls and was deeply moving, highly artistic, and sometimes disturbing.   From the art studio, we entered a recording studio where clients could take a course that culminated in their making a CD of their own music.   A number of CD's were available for us to take.   They were amazingly good!   This studio was a project of our hostess's husband, Phil, who is both a musician and a psychologist.   He serenaded us the previous evening with his Fender Stratocaster guitar, apparently the same model favored by the legendary blues musician, B.B. King.   The amount of program offerings and courses was overwhelming.   I have never seen such a comprehensive, integrated program in North America.

Mission Australia serves many aboriginal people in a culturally sensitive manner.   Another of our hostesses, Sally de Beche, now affiliated with Life Is"Foundation in Melbourne, used to work with Mission Australia in Sydney.   As part of her work she made a DVD documentary, Unsung Heroes, the stories of aboriginal elders in Dubbo, New South Wales, sharing their stories with young indigenous people.   The DVD focuses on lost traditions, cultures, and experiences for young people.   One of the elders didn't live in a house until he was 10 years old and didn't have electricity.   He was concerned about bringing his friends home because he lived in a tent.   One of the young aboriginal people commented that he didn't even know how to go camping.   It's about sharing verbal stories which the elders were forbidden to pass to the young people.   Hence, a lot of young people are just learning these stories which are not written down.   These stories explain for young people their feelings of being lost or disconnected from culture.   This reconnects them with the source of their traditions.   Sally told us how impressed she was with the resilience of these people.

We began our workshop at Mission Australia with a talking circle in which we heard people's wishes and concerns and what they wanted to learn from us.   Their focus was to learn new ways for dealing with psychological suffering.   Sally talked about using mindfulness and inner child work.   She mentioned a grief and spirituality group that she and Tony Gee conducted at Life Is"Foundation.   Everyone in that group had lost a child, either to suicide, accident, or disease.   Using a talking circle format, people told their stories to each other.   Paradoxically, this became an uplifting experience in which they connected with the link to "expansive reality".    Another participant wanted to learn about the use of ceremony with clients.   A third wanted to explore how to release ancestral pain.   I gave a short lecture about the post-modern, narrative paradigm, which is remarkably similar to indigenous thought.   I also let people know, as I have done everywhere we have gone during these two weeks, about the Narrative Medicine and Psychology Program we are starting at Union Institute & University in the USA where I teach.   I talked about how radical it is to see everything as a story, to move past the idea that some explanations (stories) are more privileged than others or that there is a "truth" out there waiting to be discovered.   In this paradigm, I said, we realize that we are forever uncertain about the nature of things.   We invent the best stories we can and revise them as we go.   In essence, this is Karl Popper's philosophy of science.   We make up stories to explain the actions of the world around us.   Some of this stories work better than others.

I talked about the Kaua'I Longitudinal Study from Hawai'i, started in 1950, in which young children, living in the most abject circumstances were followed to assess what would happen to them.   The study continues today, over 60 years later.   In the 1950's, the prediction was that everyone would be scarred for life and would have a terrible outcome.   Actually, this happened only to one-third of the children.   Another third had perfectly normal lives, and the final third excelled far beyond anyone's expectations and beyond the middle class children of the area.   Mentoring made a huge difference, sometimes even only briefly.   My point was that trauma is not always indelible or irreversible.   Today, trauma is our new devil.   "Trauma made me do it," is the contemporary story.   My point was that all truth claims are suspect and subject to refutation.   What matters is that I enter into the story of the client.   My story actually isn't very important and pales in comparison to the story of the client.   When I listen carefully to the client's story and enter into it, I can move it along toward healing, toward reduction of suffering.

I also talked about how Native North American culture is very present-centered.   The Lakota language does not have past or future tenses.   The indication that something is past or future is accomplished by a particle at the end of the sentence, almost as an afterthought.   Most of our pain happens when we live in the past or the future.   Focusing on the present reduces our pain dramatically for the present moment is usually pretty comfortable.   Unfortunately, the default nature of our brain is make stories.   That's good and bad.   We use our large brains to generate simulations of what people might do in various social situations given various behaviors we could perform.   That's really useful for being social animals but we can get carried away.   We can make story so much in the past or the future that we drive ourselves crazy.   Making story uses the least amount of glucose of any activity we do.   To meditate requires much more glucose.   Meditation is an effort.   We have to work to stop spinning yarns.   Though the effort is worthwhile.   When we stop making story and quiet our minds, we realize life is good in this moment.

I also talked about the similarity of Morita thought to Native American culture.   Morita viewed emotions as weather.   If you don't like what you are feeling, he wrote, wait five minutes.   Definitely, he said, if you are angry at someone and want to take revenge, wait three days.   You will feel differently.  

I spoke about the Lakota language having no word for "I".   There are me's, but no I's.   The implication is that we are defined by the group rather than ourselves.   As I have said before in these blogs, Lakota has no self.   Being is composed of the nagi (all the stories that shape us and the tellers of those stories), the s'icun (our presence or what we feel when a person leaves the room or when we enter the home of someone who is not there), the "breath of life" which makes the air go in and out and the blood go round and round, and finally, the spark of the Divine which lives within us.   "I" is a story we construct to fit the social situation in which we find ourselves.   We select from our many "me's" to create an "I" which changes as the social situation changes or as we evaluate the created "I" to see if it got what we wanted.   Hermans and Baumberg call this positioning.

I talked about North American aboriginal thought seeing illness as more of a teacher and biomedicine seeing it more as an enemy.     We continued our discussions and then a woman volunteered to be interviewed.   I wanted to demonstrate a narrative interview and the process by which we arrive at a shared story or metaphor for the illness. This woman whom we will call Ursula had migratory pain which rotated between her lower legs, elbows, neck, shoulders, back, and hands.   I asked for her explanatory story.    She said the doctors said that she had an autoimmune process had created her pain.   Her other story was that she was carrying the pain of her ancestors.   Medically she had been diagnosed with celiac disease, sarcoidosis, and Sjogren's syndrome.   She said her pain had been present for as long as she could remember.   As a small child she spent time in the hospital frequently for injuries.   She dislocated joints, cut herself, sprained herself, and on and on.   Between incidents she felt ok.   I inquired about her carrying the pain of her ancestors.   How did she arrive at that idea?   She said, from reading, feeling that it fit, and knowing what she knew.   "I carry their stuff.   Not with my permission except I must have agreed on some level."

"What is this stuff?" I asked.

"Negativity, dysfunction, emotional pain, physical pain."   She said that she was carrying something that" I can feel but cannot see.   It's a heaviness in body, a weight, a darkness, a blackness."   I remarked that this stuff was hard to see.   That you couldn't pet it, touch it, or see it.   It didn't walk across the lawn.   You couldn't eat it and it couldn't eat you.   (This was one elder's definition of "real" for me.)

Ursula went on to tell about her childhood physical abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from other family members.   Those experiences led her to feel unloved, disrespected, and not allowed to live a life free from danger.   At age 17, she left home.   From then on, she lived in a manner in which she felt loved, respected, and free from danger.   She said she was confused because she'd tried forgiveness and that hadn't worked.   She believed this was because she had more healing to do.   I asked her if she had talked to her pain or her joints.   She had, she said, but they were strangely silent.     I poked at her story in various ways, trying to understand her assumptions. I'd have to watch the video or read the transcript to understand how we got there, but we arrived at a shared metaphor of Ursula and this stuff as a painting with her standing in the middle of a dark and gloomy, bleak landscape without any color, and full of shame and pain.   The music playing was from Sibelius -- ponderous and solemn.   The painting was kept in a back room, away from the exhibition space of the museum.   Its only audience consisted of her husband and her two best women friends.   Nobody else was allowed to see it. "I have other paintings," she said.

"What are they?"

"I have a beautiful painting of me at the seashore in a tropical environment with deep blue water and light blue sky.   I have another painting of me in a forest surrounded by animals and my dogs.   These are my happy paintings.   We talked about the concept of the desirability of being pitiable, as in worthy of others' pity.   I told Ursula that back home on the Rez instead of hiding the gloomy painting out of side, a person might put it up on a billboard outside for everyone to see because of the desirability of being worthy of pity.   Aboriginal participants agreed that this fit Australian local culture, too.  

"You see," I said, "in dominant white culture you learn to hide your misery and shame and pain, but in other cultures, you bring it out for everyone to see as your legacy, your badges of courage, your medals of honor.   You can be proud of how you have suffered because on some level, you do it for the community.

Then we had our lunch break.

After lunch my task was to demonstrate to the participants how I would create a ceremony for Ursula in an office space in which I couldn't burn sage or tobacco or any of my other tricks.   All I could do was sing and talk.   Rocky assisted me.   Her ancestors (insert "My intuition if you don't believe in spirits) told me that they had a hard life and lived in great hardship.   Then we sang an invocation song, invited her ancestors to join us, sang an honoring song for them, and then invited Ursula to tell positive stories about them.   This proved to be very difficult.   "How do you expect them to come if you only tell negative stories?" I asked.   This was a new concept to Ursula.   She struggled and slowly found positive stories to tell about her mother, grandmother, grandfather, brother, uncle, and great-grandfather.   Once we had some positive stories, I could ask them to speak through anyone present in the room.

What emerged was a presentation by Ursula's grandfather that her grandmother and mother had done the best they could.   They had hard lives.   They were banana and dairy farmers and life was difficult.   We suggested that she needed to find more positive things to say about them.   Probably, now that they were dead, they had moved forward and perhaps they resented being presented so consistently so negatively.   Maybe she needed to tell positive stories about them.   I told her about being taught only to speak positively of the dead because they could get mad at negative comments.   We announced to her ancestors that the storage shed in which they were keeping their "stuff" was closing and they would have to come get it or it would be sold in auction.    I suggested more humor and more respect for her ancestors.   Ursula felt much better, lighter, and less dark.   What had happened is that we had moved her relationship in the past into a relationship with her ancestors in the present, which could be a very positive move toward health.

We closed with "doctoring", which is energy medicine North American aboriginal style.   Following was a discussion of the sweat lodge ceremony we would be doing the next day.   That brought us to the end of the day and we left for another marvelous dinner at Pauline's house.   Traffic was becoming intense because Sydney was having mardi gras.   We pointed out that it couldn't be mardi gras because it wasn't Tuesday.   It has to be samedi gras.  The Australians weren't amused.   This was the biggest gay parade of Sydney.   How different from what we knew from New Orleans!   Not very Catholic at all!   Traditions change across the ocean.   Who knew!   Tomorrow we will do a sweat lodge ceremony for those who want to come.