Page 213 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

182 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

a Spiritual Care Perspective
Koshin Paley ellison
What do routines, rituals, and resilience have to do with providing care
and taking care of ourselves? What do they have to teach us as ways to
approach disasters? From my combined experiences and trainings as a
Zen Buddhist priest, social worker, poet, chaplain, chaplain supervisor,
and psychotherapist, they have much to offer. My Zen Buddhist practice
truly informs and imbues the rest. We train to continually return to the
transitory nature of all things. This is not a nihilistic view or practice
but a great sense of opening to a larger sense of the world, going beyond
our small isolated selves to a sense of connectedness. I have practiced for
many years with allowing myself to see the preciousness of life and how
an intrinsic part of this is how life blooms and fades, sometimes violent,
sometimes neutral, sometimes with ease.
My first direct teaching of this came from attending the week-long
bearing-witness retreats at Auschwitz–Birkenau. I wanted to go to a place
of personal and collective devastation in the context of a yearly ritual of
a spiritual retreat. For a week each November, the retreat of international
and interfaith group convenes at the camp. The ritual consists of memo-
rial services at the crematories and day-long sitting in meditation at the
selection site where people were unloaded from the cattle cars. All day
and into early evening, the people in the meditation circle chanted the
names of the dead. For the sake of focus of this short essay, I will not go
into detail of this powerful ritual. I will say that it was my first experience
of how ritual can transform something that is contracted within me (like
my own ignorant and abstract hatred of Germans and Poles) that after 5
years of attending and participating in this group ritual has allowed me to
become more resilient. By resilient, I mean I am able to see my own hatred
and bigotry as part of my personal life and as a part of human nature. The
camp itself offered up a valuable image of the negative Shadow that can
exist in my life and all of our lives. It was at Auschwitz that I vowed to
serve in the world to help others integrate their darkness with their whole
sense of self.
As I write this, I think of the Cambodians under siege during the time
of Pol Pot’s killing fields. Many families were being slaughtered, and
each thought they themselves were likely to be next. There are numer-
ous accounts of mass groups of people gathering together in the Buddhist
temples and chanting together: “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love
alone will there be healing. This is the ancient and eternal law.” I have