My Journey Around The Courage Room
What does courage have to do with the heart?
The word courage comes from the Latin cor and Greek kar, words for the heart.
In many cultures around the world, the heart is associated with emotional expression and personal truth. Corage migrated to English in the Middle Ages, where it came to mean any emotion in one’s heart-mind.
That’s right: any emotion, even ‘negative’ ones. Corage didn’t only mean ‘a brave heart’ and ‘fearlessness.’ It also meant a sad, wicked, prideful, jealous, pained heart. It meant everything that a human heart could contain!
And isn’t it that the truth? Even our hard, angry and fearful parts are the raw ingredients of courage.
I know this from personal experience: those parts (and the paths) may be transformed.
Brain-Body-Spirit. ALL our patterns, habits and self-beliefs originate as neural pathways in our brains (and our bodies.)
We can make NEW PATHS. That’s the good news. We can change our brains.
My Books, My Life
In my twenties and thirties, my path to courageous change was writing & learning in other cultures. The record of this began in Touch The Dragon, a book describing the year I lived in Thailand at 17. It was a national bestseller for almost three years and set me on an exciting career path as a writer and traveller. The adventure continued through my other books.
A few of my greatest teachers have been 1) an old Greek shepherd (in One Room in a Castle and many of my poetry collections) 2) former political prisoners, refugees and Buddhist monks (Myanmar) (in The Lizard Cage, Burmese Lessons, The Border Surrounds Us ) desire and trauma (all of my books, in a way, but especially The Change Room, a more recent novel about sexuality, motherhood and hidden trauma and, 3) my complicated family (Grace and Poison, Come Cold River, and my book-in-progress).
During my later thirties and forties, many of my writing students at both the graduate and undergraduate level were wrestling with and writing about traumatic family and political histories. They were a great inspiration. They were also my teachers. Their courage, pain, and ability to create and to keep going, growing, led me towards a new career as a psychotherapist. My own courage, pain and ability to create led me there, too. (People who know my books are familiar with the depth of these personal explorations.)
Cultural awareness, respect for sexual and racial diversity, and anti-racism are essential parts of my lifelong experience and continued learning in community.
I am vocally anti-genocide, anti-colonialist and appreciative every day of the Indigenous lands that I live on and honour across Turtle Island. I talk to the trees, the plants, all the creatures and land around me; I try to practice reciprocity and gift-giving as a way of life.
I’ve been taught these practices from my childhood, by my adoptive families in various countries, and by my friends and mentors in the Olive Grove where I live and work part of the year in rural Greece.
In Toronto, I live just a few blocks below Davenport Road, one of the oldest known roads in Canada, known in Anishnaabe as Gete-Onigaming. For at least 13,000 years, the Wendat, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and other First Peoples walked there along the ancient glacial Lake Iroquois, then on their later portage journeys between the Humber and the Don Rivers. These are sacred lands—as is every land, all this Earth.
As a psychotherapist, healing at the personal level was a fundamental part and practice of my therapeutic education: the curriculum involved being in the same Group Therapy training cohort for five years. Panayeia mou, as we say in Greek (Holy Mother!) It was intense, it was challenging, and it changed my life.
As I became healthier, I shed relationships and ways of being that no longer reflected who I was. My world and language changed again, though my countries—Canada and Greece—stayed the same this time. My training as a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist took over 6 years. It’s ongoing—I’ll never finish this class. I’ve also trained in applied neuroscience and biomechanics. My therapy, teaching and coaching work all involve clear, comprehensible information about essential brain health practices.
The strands of creativity, healing and growth take a lifetime to braid together. At the spiritual level, simply to be alive—to have been called forth, into being, and being-ness throughout these years—is a mystery and a blessing. Every day, every moment.
Accelerated hypnotherapy uses your unconscious mind to help you change patterns and get unstuck. it’s a little bit like magic: Magic based on neuroscience.
We also consciously learn skilful ways of working with brain-Body-Spirit.
Are you ready to join The Courage Room?
Reach out and let’s see where it leads.