This week a man I sit with, who is in his eighties, told me about standing at the door of his own house and speaking to the dark energy that had been living there, that we have been working with. And then he told me how it answered, which was with more fight than it had ever put up. The closer he gets to liberation, he said, the fiercer those energies become, because they know. They know they are being cast out. They know they are dying.
He can hear the dark ones on the other side of that door. THIS IS MY HOUSE. I’M NOT GOING. Fierce old tenants, those interlopers, loud because they are frightened, and in a pain they have never let themselves feel. What undoes me is that I also grieve for them while he holds the door shut. I propose that if they could only stop trying to control, they could have pleasure too. I hope they are listening.
I come to dark energy the way I come to any part, with compassion, while also holding a fierce protection for this client that I love so dearly, but he has come to his own insight as wise elders do. “If you can’t say no with some authority,” he said, “then your compassion is not compassion. It’s buying in.” He has a word for the other thing, no-ing, and he says the no-ing has to come from the knowing, from what he calls his truth place, what I call sovereignty and what IFS refers to as Self.
He spoke the same truth I do when I teach on touch and consent: there is no “yes” without a solid “no.” I have said that sentence to rooms full of people for years, and he handed it right back to me.
I came to this work from therapy and now sit as a spiritual doula, consultant and executive coach, and in every one of those chairs I am in service to the person across from me. It would be a lie to say I am not also their student. With him the chairs have traded places for so long that I couldn’t tell you whose is the elder’s seat. I hold elder for him in our sessions, and he holds it for me too.
He is walking the last years of his life, and he walks them slowly. He told me he found his truth place again in the slow steps between one room of his house and the next, every step taken on purpose, and that it felt like power. I thought of the days my own body makes me sit, the gift in a body that will not consent to my strategies for efficacy. Those breaks began as a collapse, now they are micromoments of practice, glimpses of expansiveness as Loch Kelly calls them.
When he passes we will still be in relationship, though the relationship will change shape. We have both said yes to our ongoing relationship once he leaves his body. And in that shift, he will simply be my elder. How fortunate I am to have had the honor of supporting him in his liberation.
Maybe you have someone like him. Someone you are in service to who turned out to be the teacher. Anyone who has spent an afternoon with a small child knows how freely a little person can be themselves, how truthful they are with the full expression of their internal states (unless of course their own trauma has annihilated that honest expression). A friend of mine has a daughter who has Down syndrome. In her there is no guile. She too is my teacher. I wonder who in your care has been teaching you all along.
May you close the doors that need closing with authority.
May your no-ing come from the knowing, from the sovereign truth place.
May the people you serve teach you, and may you be a good student.
May the door between you and the ones who go ahead stay open from your side.
Disclosure: This writing was read by the client to whom I refer, and he provided enthusiastic consent to post.