by Imogen O’ Connor

I owe so much as a psychotherapist and as a person, to my clients, to the professional training I have received, and to my therapists. To my clients: who, by giving of themselves so generously, have given me the most profound experiences of connection. To the late Miceal O’Regan and the staff at the Institute of Psychosynthesis and Transpersonal Theory: who not only gave me such an excellent professional training but the imperative to practice a daily, mindful, embodied presence to self. To my therapists, Rosaleen Doyle, Ger Murphy and Marian Dunlea: for showing me the way back to myself.

The following poems explore this theme of connection, with self and other. The Space Between Us describes what Martin Buber has called healing through meeting – those moments of connection which transform both client and therapist.

Goodbye deals with the therapist’s experience of the end of a therapeutic relationship, and the redemptive loss arising from such a deep therapeutic connection.

In The Hero’s Journey I explore my own understanding of Assagioli’s conception of the self; how the self is present in its entire complexity from birth, but in ‘compressed’ form (in the same way as the potential for oak tree is contained within the acorn). The poem describes the unfolding of the self through a person’s lifetime, as consciousness evolves and expands, through the development of an ego, into the potential for a grounded experience of the transpersonal self.  It is my belief that while we accompany our clients on only a small part of this epic journey into selfhood, it is our task to accompany ourselves fully to the very end of our beginnings.

So, to my clients, to the staff at Eckhart House, and to my therapists, for all that I have received, the only gift I can give you all is gratitude.

 

The Space Between Us

 

I have sat in silence in the presence of another

And witnessed the light from each of us

Reach outwards to embrace the other

Without touching.

I have savoured the Divine

Melting slowly like matter

On the tip of the tongue.

I have given myself over

To the space cleared

Of voice and hypothesis

And have felt the seed of healing

Pulsate like a furnace.

 

I have witnessed all these things

And stilled the need for speaking.

 

Goodbye

The moment has arrived

When I hold my breath

Against the open door of goodbye,

And against the empty seat, still warm

With seven years of grinding

The knife of pain into joy.

 

Not surprisingly,

I am as changed as he,

As healed, as wholed, as freed,

Yet this moment of his leaving

Lingers heavy and sharp

In the flesh of my heart,

 

And my eyes follow him

With their trembling light

As he walks down the path,

Through the gate, into the evening street

And away round the corner

Of a future I cannot see.

 

I close the door,

In a yawn of silence.

And turn in the empty dark, startled

By the Present curled on the chair

Waiting for me to gather her up

In the arms of my next breath –

 

 

The Hero’s Journey

 

You and I

Are walking towards

The cave of our beginnings.

 

I thought we were walking straight

Towards that spark

On the horizon,

 

But in fact, we are walking a curve

Masquerading as a line

As it curls round to the back step

 

Of that dark place

From which we became,

Before memory was erased by flesh.

 

We have spent a lifetime

Forgetting what we now toil

So bravely to reclaim.

 

I pray that we will enter the womb room

Through the low back door

With wrinkled skin and hearts drooping wisdom

 

And in that still tomb

We might see the familiar

With the newness of old eyes.

 

We would tip back our heads in delight

That we have come home finally

To taste our cask of holy wine

 

And to drink deep

Through the seasoned lips

Of a lifetime.

 

Imogen O’Connor originally trained as a social worker then worked as a psychotherapist in the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre before moving into private practice as a therapist and supervisor.  Over the last year she has been experimenting with poetry as a medium in her own personal development for accessing the unconscious and uncovering a deeper personal connection with self.  She and her family have recently moved from Dublin to Co. Sligo.