Haiku and Healing
The Haiku and Healing Panel this morning featured Don
Eulert, Angela Deodhar and Daniel Spurgeon.
Spurgeon began his comments by focusing on “being
present.” As a Hospice worker, he discussed working with people who are dying,
grieving, shifting to end of life care. As a practitioner of haiku, he argued
that sensory connection is a way to become present. Connecting to his body and himself
is a way to connect to this person or family.
Deodhar handed out a pamphlet of haibun, many of which
dealt with using writing as a way to heal or served as her personal evidence of
the power of writing to heal.
Eulert began with a
personal definition of haiku: “the way things come together in nature to
give a momentary glimpse into the oneness of things, and the offness of things.”
He argued for keeping the ego and personal out of haiku. As a teacher of
therapists and psychologists, he said that he tried to urge them to “take the
subjective out of the objective. If they can’t take their subjectivity out of
the objective moment, they won’t be good healers.” He also urged us to remember
that we were not talking about curing, but healing, which he defined as a restoration
of harmony, balance and relationship.
When asked by Spurgeon, “How did being ill relate to your
connection to your own body, and how did haiku help your awareness of that
connection?” Deodhar responded “Just the act of putting it down was healing. In
the ICU, see monitors, etc.—you’re very aware of your own body.”
When asked about his use of haiku and writing in therapy,
Spurgeon responded “It’s very rare that I’ll ask a patient or family to write,
rare that I’ll use haiku as intervention. My practice of haiku affects me,
affects my way of being, and I bring that into the room—it affects the energy. When
someone gets witnessed without agenda, but a clear slate of knowledge, it can
be so connecting and healing.”
After Deodhar read her haibun, ““A Year Later,” Spurgeon
brought up Issa’s haibun about his dead children. He discussed Joan Halifax,
who wrote Being With Dying and
presented the Dhrama Podcast “On Grief and Buddhism,” in which she argues that
Issa is “opening the hand of grief.
Later, Spurgeon argued that haibun is particularly
powerful for grief because “the prose allows you to go where ever you want.
That part of us that wants to tell our story, over and over again, the prose
offers a place for our voice to do whatever we need to do. Haiku asks for
structure, for pointed observation. Haiku offers an opportunity to get present
to this world. “
This was a very moving panel, and profound and energetic
enough to go overtime. What I really enjoyed was how all the panelists
connected haiku to the body, contemplatively as well as physically. It was a
beautiful and engaging reminder of the power of writing.
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