Closure

I've been writing a few posts on closure over the last month. Yesterday was yet again a closure, a closure of one of the most, no, the most, intense courses I've ever done. Pretty literally a one year journey into oneself. 

What propelled me to join the BSIC course, (Basic Skills in Counselling) is an innate interest in people.......plus maybe some kind of a lofty ideal of being able to enable clarity and joy. Also a native interest in psychology, human behavior, self awareness and such. Little did I know that to learn how to do counselling and therapy one would need to parallely go through an intensive and long term process of therapy oneself. 

It is said that unless the counsellor is self actualized, how can she (he) self actualize the client. 

"If there were indeed such a thing as complete self actualization, what is (facts) and what ought to be (values) would fuse - our authentic self would match our value and there would be no more conflict"  - Becoming Naturally Therapeutic 

So you can imagine the process...it pretty much rips through you. And this was something each of the twelve of us who journeyed the year committed ourselves to. And what a deep and intense journey that was. You get challenged from every side, and sure, also held and supported from every side, but there's no taking away the tremendous churn it creates. At one time the most difficult, and the most fulfilling of experiences and learnings.

It's about being inner directed, and nicely described in 'Becoming Naturally Therapeutic'by Jaquelyn Small:

• Break old structures and try new behaviors 
• Personal growth comes from personal interactions, not individually
• Do away with the self consciousness of the adolescent in you (move away from everything happens because of me)
• Learn to know and accept your strengths....and your limitations
• Within the above boundaries exploit your potential to the best
• Life is a series of choices (growth or regression). Make choices for growth
• Listen to your natural impulses, your intuition
• Be fully alive, and enjoy living
• Find challenges in life
• Develop stress hardiness, so that your coping is transformational rather than regressive
• Balance your development in all the planes.....mental, physical, emotional and spiritual

If I started to write in depth, I think I'd write a book :)

There's a cohesion and rigour to the structure of the course that's mind blowing....the two words I'm left with are 'beautiful' and 'intense'

Beyond the regular course content done through the year, we had weekly individual sessions of personal counselling (around forty sessions) ten weeks of process group (which has intriguing objectives like making the invisible visible, enacting the withheld, owning the disowned) my first such experience and it was fascinating, then a personal 'transactional analysis', which is done through a questionnaire consisting of 56 unbelievably incisive questions, which are then analysed by a TA expert, and learning on spirituality and counselling from an expert who has spent twenty years working on body, mind and spirit connect, which was almost transcendental in depth. 

A whole year of this and it sure has it's impact. .......you know yourself like never before, and not just know yourself, you find you've undergone a metamorphosis.  And now it's all you....there is no karma, no childhood issues, no genetics, no pointing fingers......no nothing. You have full ownership for your life. In the here and now. Self awareness at levels I hadn't dreamt of. Very powerful....scary too....but fundamentally empowering.

Now you'd get why this closure could have been intense.

That's all twelve of us in a groupie:

L to R, sitting Fariha and Monica and standing Kshitij, Shweta, Meby, Thomas, Malini, Suma, Asha, Preethi, me and Saurabh

This one's with Sharada (right front)  Gayatri and Vinitha,(behind her), our dearest facilitators for the year 

This is outside Parivarthan

After that intense and heavy closure, we went out for a much needed cheers, to this place most aptly called 'hangover' :)

To the entire team at Parivarthan......Sharada, Gayatri, Vinitha, Malini, Shabnam, Manish, Veenal, Snehal, Padma, Sophie, and Leo ........through that ten minutes of absolute spellbound silence when we closed ........... when there wasn't a dry eye in the room......it was our gratitude that overflowed.