Harry Potter and Lupin: A Healing Conversation [Part Two]
(This is a continuation of Harry Potter and Lupin [Part One]) It’s Lupin, a new teacher at Hogwarts that year, who asks Harry Potter to stay after class for a word. And it’s with Lupin that Harry Potter finds it possible to broach the question he’s been longing to ask. ‘Why? Why do they affect me like that? Am I just —-?’ ‘It has nothing to do with weakness,’ said Professor Lupin sharply, as though he had read Harry’s mind. ‘The dementors affect you worse than the others because there are horrors in your past that the others don’t have.’ A ray of wintry sunlight fell across the classroom, illuminating Lupin’s gray hairs and the lines on his young face. ‘Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can’t see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself. . . soul-less and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life. And the worst that happened to you, Harry, is enough to make anyone fall off their broom. You have nothing to feel ashamed of.’ Harry Potter, as you may well know, was present at the murder of his parents when he was just an infant. The trauma of the murder has left him vulnerable. It’s his point of weakness, his Achilles heel. And what Professor Lupin does, as perhaps some of the best teachers have always done, is to explain Harry to himself, provide him with a context which can allow him to make sense of his experience and which no longer requires him to feel shame. That, it seems to me, is one of the things that a healing conversation can do: offer the kind of context that can help someone to see themselves—and their situation—more clearly. And, in doing so, be relieved, perhaps, of a misplaced burden of shame. And this, I have no doubt, can be...
read moreThe Last Chinese Chef [Part Two]: Food for the Soul
[This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on the novel, The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones, which has just been released.] There’s one passage in particular—a conversation between Maggie and Sam Liang, the chef, that I think fits in especially well during this month in which I’m writing about healing conversation. This particular conversation occurs as one of a series of conversations that they have while Sam is cooking and Maggie is watching him cook. Sam has prepared a chicken, Chinese-style, and he offers some of the chicken to Maggie and she begins to eat the chicken and, as she does so, feels herself begin to “melt with comfort.” She speaks: ”Are you going to make this for the banquet?” “No,” he said. “This I made for you.” She looked up quickly. “These are flavors for you, right now,” he explained, “to benefit you. Ginger and cilantro and chives; they’re very powerful. Very healing.” “Healing of what?” she said, and put her chopsticks down. . . “Grief,” he said. ”Grief?” The unpleasant nest of everything she felt pressed up against the surface, sadness, shame, anger. . . Her voice, when it came out, sounded bewildered. “You’re treating me for grief?” “No,” he insisted, “I’m cooking for you. There’s a difference.” She tried to master the upheavals inside her. She would not cry in front of him. “Maybe you should have asked me first.” “Really?” “It’s a bit difficult for me.” “Well, for that I’m sorry. Forgive me. You’re American and I should have thought of that. Here, this is how we’re trained—to know the diner, perceive the diner, and cook accordingly. Feed the body, but that’s only the beginning. Also feed the mind and the soul.” There. That’s it. I think that’s what Nicole Mones is doing especially well in this book. She’s touched that aspect of culture–of Chinese culture in this case–that feeds the soul. And she’s found a way to translate that into the writing itself—into this novel— There’s a sense in which, in her grief, Maggie, the central character, is longing for a kind of food, a kind of conversation, that she doesn’t even quite know that she’s longing for—until it appears—and then she is able to be comforted by it. Here is how Nicole Mones describes the feeling of comfort that blooms inside Maggie after she eats that chicken: “It put a roof over her head and a patterned warmth around her so that even though all her anguish was still with her it became, for a moment, something she could bear.” . . . even though all her anguish was still with her it became, for a moment, something she could bear. At its best, I think this is what healing conversation–and sometimes healing books–and healing poems–can...
read moreEmily’s Story: Reframing Anorexia
The thread this week (which, again, may or may not be apparent) is how looking at something in a different way can shift things. And perhaps one of the clearest instances I’ve seen of this shift happened with Emily, a young woman with anorexia who I’ve written about here before. She had severe anorexia, weighed only fifty-two pounds when I began seeing her. And she had, when I first began to see her, a definite point of view toward her body. She viewed her body as the problem—disgusting actually—a stance that only became accentuated after a meal. Her stomach would protrude a bit after a meal—and she would see and feel this protrusion as disgusting. The body was seen as the problem. The body, in her point of view, was disgusting. And the antidote? It began with horses. Or some part of the antidote began with horses. Horses helped her reframe the story of her own body. It started like this. Emily began to imagine a safe place where she could experience healing. She imagined herself at a barn among horses. Then, with time—and this was a surprise to me—something I didn’t foresee—she began to realize that it was easier to have a stomach when she imagined herself being around the horses. She felt freer among the horses. She felt free to eat a meal and have a small pouch of a stomach afterward. She didn’t feel so disgusted by her own stomach—so disgusted by her own body. And all of this had something to do with the fact that she felt the horses weren’t judging her. It had something to do with taking a respite, for a while, from human eyes. It wasn’t that all human eyes that looked at her body looked upon it with judgment—but some did—and some had in the past. She’d had some shaming experiences as a child and into her teen years. And, perhaps because of this history, it seemed, at least for the time being, all human eyes were suspect. All human eyes put her at risk. But the horses’ eyes. She felt safer with them. This went on for a while, imagining herself at the barn among the horses. And as she practiced imagining herself the way the horses saw her she began to imagine that her pouch of a stomach could be a kind of pregnancy. The pouch she’d once perceived as ugly and shameful began to transform when she began to see it from a new point of view. She didn’t think she was literally pregnant. It wasn’t delusional like that. It was subtler, and more in the imaginal realm. She told me that she could sometimes hold onto the thought that the pouch of her stomach was a pregnancy, and inside it she was carrying some new kind of life, and, sometimes, she told me, this made her feel something like hope. A pregnancy. New life. She was beginning to imagine her body as nurturing—as potentially good. And it was one of those moments—I can remember thinking this—it was a moment that had the potential to change things. If the body is potentially good, then maybe, just maybe, it would be okay to nourish that body, to feed it, to offer it sustenance. The moment, if truth be...
read moreFour Ways of Looking at Healing, in No Particular Order
Purple tulips in the window A photograph of purple tulips in the window A woman whose daughter has died, sixteen years ago, and, still, the grief, it catches her unaware—that raw fresh ache. This is more frequent in January. How do you do it? I ask her. I really want to know, how does she do it. I picture her getting up every morning, making breakfast, walking the dog—it’s wet some days and cold—and then there’s all that has to be done next. How do you do it? She says she knows that she will see her again. When she dies she will see her daughter again. She tells me this as if it is the most obvious thing. Remembering to refill the bird feeders on a winter afternoon and then looking out the kitchen window—finches—swooping in to the feeder as if to some busy midtown diner, where inside it’s warm, there’s a waitress inside refilling coffee, and voices, that sound of forks against...
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