I have had the fortune to have experienced the life and death of some remarkable people. When I say remarkable I suppose I mean influential – in a positive way.
Don McFarland (the man who founded Body Harmony) showed me resilience and positivity quite apart from being a remarkable teacher and practitioner. He was ahead of his time in terms of practising enjoyment.
Some part of me must have been contemplating Don’s life and influence within me, and in one of the rare dreams I remember it became clear to me that in Don’s life – embodied largely in sunny California, it was actually the sun itself that directly contributed to his large and positive persona. Once, in the cenotes of Mexico, Don’s leg speared through a rotted platform built to allow tourists to access the water. There were no hospitals or medical support available. He never once complained about his situation, which was not good. He breathed, he kept his hands in contact with his leg, he responded with what was available from within him.
Some twenty or so years later, Don stated to me close to the time of his death that he had experienced pain for decades as a result of a break in his spine. I never heard him mention that pain. One of the effects of his ‘neurological event’, commonly referred to as a stroke ( this took place a couple of years before he passed), was that the pain in his back disappeared after more than fifty years. I never once heard him complain about his pain and I worked with him closely for thirty years. I’m not suggesting that the denial of pain is a good thing, but what I am suggesting is that when our body feeds back to our brain sensations of pain there are different ways of responding to it. Don was not a fan of labelling things, so my mention of the word ‘stroke’ would go against his grain. A label can take a process and turn it in to a thing. People relate to processes differently than they do to things it would seem.
Recently my mother-in-law Myra Carruthers passed away. Myra was well known to Don as was Don to Myra. They were born with months of each other. They lived through decades in our cultures unknown to me, and they had some very similar loves, most notably sunshine. In the early stages of my relationship with my mother-in-law, as a 20 year old keenly pursuing practising Body Harmony, I was offered a job in one of Myra’s shops in the city in Sydney. This was an economic lifesaver and also allowed myself and my partner Gina to work together. In the dream I had the night before attending her funeral in Sydney last month I became clear what indeed the loss was for me around the passing of my mother-in-law. It was her sense of industry. Myra Carruthers was a powerhouse of industrious will. Her business world offered a grounded and secure environment to be in, and her attitudes about work, and her love of work created a family culture that seeped in to me. In a story to rival the one of Don’s mentioned above, Myra once jumped off a chair lift at the wrong time while on a skiing trip with her granddaughter. She fell a couple of metres and fractured her ankle. To ensure her businesses ran smoothly, she hobbled around at 3 am in the morning willing her body into action against the advice of her doctor. Perhaps that is not the best thing, but that is who she was, in a similar way to Don. They both very much took their own counsel.
Image by Gina Carruthers
Mind over matter, grit, or whatever you want to call it, for whatever else I experienced with both of these people they both demonstrated a capacity of mind that supported their individual successes in life. There were no excuses offered as to why things didn’t turn out.
“Your geography becomes your biology.” I first heard these words from Don and they had a particular resonance to them. The good, the bad and the ugly – they can all soak in to the fibres of your being and become a part of you. And they can present at different times as your behavioural responses to your circumstances. As a direct personal example of this, my mother lost her sister to a car accident when I was in utero. The news of her sister’s passing stimulated a false labour ten weeks before my actual birth. The doctor prescribed sedation to assist with the grief…
It literally took my mother two years to pop out of the depressive cloud of the loss of her sister, which incidentally happened spontaneously when, on one spring morning, she awoke to the sunshine, the sky and a feeling of renewal. For many years I sensed, on occasion, an immense well of grief within myself. It was an undercurrent feeling, submerged like an iceberg occasionally bobbing its head above the water line. A pre-verbal lake of loss. Perhaps some thirty three years ago I watched the film ‘Ghost’ at the suggestion of Don McFarland. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, – not a cry, a gut wrenching, painful, seemingly unending sense of loss. In my life I had no reason to feel such grief I rationalised. But there you have it. Was it my loss or a loss I was a participant in? And to my newly forming nervous system perhaps there is no sense of difference or distinction.
In reviewing such events that become part of the fabric of who you are, I am reminded to consider the benefits of such experiences. As one area may be developmentally diminished another area may flourish. You may make a career out of the qualities that flourished. However when that developmentally challenged part of you shows up, the part that learned to trust loss for example, it’s reassuring to know that a good pair of listening hands can help to re-educate your expectations and align you with the greater possibilities that life may have in store for you.
Duncan Hogg
Certified Practitioner & Teacher, President
