Foot Prints
articles by the tca community

The Power of The Open Heart

Laura Brown

     Listening to Mary Heiny Sensei talking in class before the August demos about having an open heart in our practice resonated very loudly for me. I’ve been a therapist since 1972 when I first walked onto an inpatient psychiatric unit the week after my college graduation. During graduate school in psychology I stumbled accidentally (although I realize now that it was no accident) into working with the survivors of severe trauma, what I have come to call the “childhood from hell,” people whose every adult owner violated their minds, bodies and spirits in all imaginable, and many unimaginable ways. The people I work with are amazing human beings. Despite pain and terror, they have struggled to have lives of dignity and decency, compassion for others, although rarely for themselves at first. They are my heroes, because in the face of endless invitations to themselves become violent and abusive, they are kind and loving.

     In 2000, after 21 years in full time practice, I stopped working. I told myself and everyone that I was taking a sabbatical and would come back in six months. But I was deeply uncertain about ever again working as a therapist. I had stopped because I could feel my heart closing up and crusting over. It’s impossible do my work with a closed heart. For people to feel connected, and thus to heal, a therapist’s heart has to be open, and mine had been. But now my heart was shutting fast.

     I knew a lot by then about empowering my clients. But I didn’t know yet how to be in my own center when I did that. So as Mary Heiny Sensei demonstrated for us, I had begun to tense up, to hunch over, to shut down, knowing no other way to respond to the pain with which I was in daily, hourly contact. My heart hurt from the pain it was absorbing, something therapists call “vicarious traumatization,” but I could only visualize it as my heart, covering itself with scabs and scars.

     I came back to work in 2001 cautious, not fully open. I needed to make a living, and I had not found anything else that captured my interest that way that being a psychologist did. I cut back on being a therapist and took a teaching job. I kept on struggling to be open in my work. Then in April of 2003, three months after my 50th birthday, I began to study aikido. I went because I wanted to learn how to fall down. I cried during every class and after every class for the entire two months of the beginners’ series. I’m a stubborn person, so I stayed; I knew by the end of those two months that aikido had something important to offer me besides learning to fall down. I had thought until a little while ago that it was there to teach me humility and beginner’s mind, which may also be true.

     This last month, I finally got it. Several events solidified my understanding of what had drawn me to and kept me at the dojo. The first two events were traumatic. In one week our state Supreme Court declared it legal to discriminate against me and all of the other queer Washingtonians who simply want the legal benefits of marriage to the people we love. Two days later an insane man broke into the Jewish Federation of Seattle, shooting six women, murdering one. It was a bad week to be a Jewish lesbian in Seattle. As I sat glued to the TV screen that Friday afternoon, hoping that none of my acquaintances who worked at the Fed were among the physically injured, tears streaming down my face, I kept thinking, “I can go to the dojo tomorrow and find my center.”

     Which I did. I went to class Saturday morning and told myself that all I was there to do that day was find my center. Technique, footwork, throwing, everything else was secondary. As nage and as uke, I searched for my center. There it was, calming me, anchoring me, helping me to get back into a place where I could then reach out to the members of my communities and offer the care and support that they needed from me, the expert trauma therapist. And as I settled into my center, I could feel my open heart, a heart which had healed, become wiser, I hope; a heart open, able to respond because I had learned in this very embodied way that we call aikido how to also protect myself in that open, interested, invited stance that is necessary for my task as a healer. A few weeks later I heard Mary Sensei speak and all of the pieces came together.

     In those moments I believe I discovered why I had come to aikido. I needed to learn to find my center while keeping my heart open. It’s impossible to be a good uke when you’re not in your center, after all. It’s impossible to be a good nage when you’re so busy figuring out what you’re going to do next that you’re not relating in the moment to uke and what s/he is doing. Therapy combines elements of both of these aikido roles. As a therapist, I must follow my clients, be fascinated by them, and have my heart open to them; like uke, I must have clarity of intention, connect fully, not draw back. And as a therapist, I must be engaged, responsive, not thinking about what technique I will perform, but rather be able to respond in the moment to whatever my clients bring to the table—and I must do so with an open heart. Good nageship and good ukemi have in common that they are practiced from our centers, with our hearts wide open.

     That open heart is powerful indeed. Watching Mary Heiny Sensei open her heart and move ki through the room was a visual, embodied representation of something I have come back to knowing in my practice as a psychotherapist. When my heart is open to my clients, when I connect with them fully, when I allow myself to sense their energies and move with them, never pushing, never pulling, allowing the gravity of their momentum to define our mutual arc in space, then they feel their own power and I lose none of mine. When my clients sense my open heart, they feel a sense of safety; often it takes months or years for them have the words to describe it, but I can see them settling, something shifting in their energies and their bodies as they relate to me. Their hearts open, they feel their own power, they change, they begin to heal.

     One thing I learned very early in my work as a new baby therapist is that we do not have the choice to avoid pain. We can practice the arts of self-deception, of dissociation, of numbness, or acting out. We can do all of those things in pursuit of the illusion that we will feel no pain—and then when these mechanisms break down the pain is enormous, threatening to overwhelm us. Those are the moments when people walk into my office, the walls around their wounds breached, the nerve endings raw. People tell themselves, and me, that they have failed because they are feeling.

     The alternative, which my clients and I learn and re-learn together is this--we can accept that if we feel, some pain will be part of feeling; if we are fully alive, if we open our hearts, we will know and accept that at some moment our hearts will be broken. It will hurt. It will be no surprise that we feel pain and because we are open and in our centers, our energies running through us freely, the pain will move through, too. The power of an open heart is the power to touch ourselves and others, to feel fully, and to know that we will survive whatever comes our way and grow from it. That, my clients have taught me, is one of the most powerful things any human can know. So when I come to class and stand across from uke or nage, I do my best to open my heart, to engage fully with this person, because in that open heart and engagement it will matter less that I’m a slow-learning aging fourth kyu student, and more that I’m a human, present, connected, in contact in this marvelous thing called aikido.

Laura Brown has been a practicing psychotherapist for more than 30 years, specializing in working with survivors of complex trauma. In her life outside the dojo she is an author and teacher. She started to train after age 50 because she needed to learn to fall down