care

con·tend
/kənˈtend/
verb
“to struggle to surmount (a difficulty or danger); to struggle for”

Each of us has a Story worth knowing.

Our life stories are full of triumphs and tragedies, and everything in between. Our stories are meant for great care. We are meant to have compassionate witnesses in every moment of our humanity: our joy, heartache, shame, and more.

The presence of another who is contending on our behalf changes us. Our own presence who is kindly contending for our own heart (rather than treating ourselves without kindness) changes us for the better. Love from another transforms us.

The beauty of our bodies is that we can apply kindness retroactively in our stories and be healed. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes the following about our good bodies:

“The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in the pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream” (Women Who Run With the Wolves).

Once it does, we may treat it with a tenderness it has never known.

Our suffering stays with us—lodged in our bodies—if we are not tended to well at the time of our pain. Traumatic suffering creates fragmentation in us: we feel disconnected from others and even ourselves. Neuroscience tells us that trauma quite literally changes our brains; parts of us shut down to survive. Unless we receive the help we need, we inherit solitary defences that help us survive the moment, yet in the long-term, these protective measures end up hurting us and those we love. They keep us from what we most need to heal.

When we tell our stories in communities with presence, honour, and kindness, we have the opportunity to healthily integrate memories from even years ago. Our bodies make sense of what was incomprehensible, our brains mend themselves, our souls resurrect. We can reconnect—and come back to life.

We are meant to live at peace, fully alive.

This is care. This is the path I walk with you as your counsellor. I kindly contend for each and every story you bring, and I invite you to do the same.

“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?