When a Session is Done

Q: I curious, when you are doing a piece of work like you just did with N, So much of the work is personal experiencing, and yet you are a midwife to that experience, supporting it and helping her create it. How do you know when to stop, I am not sure how to ask the question.

Dick: Well, how do you know when you are having a meal, when you have had enough to eat? It is just a feeling, right? It is a little hard to describe.

Q: I am not sure if you are listening to you, or looking for some kind of clue from her, or some kind of combination.

Dick: Well, I am in touch with her, so I am looking at, and listening and watching, and in touch with her. And I am also in touch with myself. And primarily the signal comes from me, because I can watch her and pick up various things, but I have to feel finished. Sometimes people will say that they are finished and I don't feel finished, and I will go on. And occasionally I will stop when people say that they are not finished. It is my own signal that I follow. What happened here was that I sang that song, which is a translation of a very old Navaho night song. The melody was mine but the words are a translation from the Navaho. Such a profound song. When I had done that long enough, I stopped and when I looked at her, she opened her eyes and I felt that she was through, she was back, she was out of it, ready to come here again. Does that explain anything?

The use of chanting and song, I think, is very important as a therapist. It is important for your client to use the voice too. And you may want to induce that. But to use your own voice, use the images that come to you, like for M, the image that I saw twenty years ago, when it came, I just used it.

So the things that come to you, as opposed to figuring out what they are doing and where they should go next, and what they should do. That may well be another way of working, but it is not the way that I work.

The world is wide,

yet but a little place,

and this hill's shoulder hides another hill,

You get to the top of this hill and you can see the other hill, but you don't know what that hill is going to be until you get to the top of this one. Then it appears. And that is pretty much the way that I work. I climb this hill, and when I have climbed this one, I see the next one. And that is how I am guided.