Table in the Clearing: A Weekend Retreat

November 12-14, 2010

Since 2000, we have been holding an alternative Thanksgiving ritual, a Table in the Clearing, at a New England prison for men serving long terms. See http://www.truthout.org/1122093 and http://www.falling-apart.net/node/60. Now we are setting the Table at Geryunant as well.

Through such practices as Focusing, drawing and writing, we search for parts of ourselves we have exiled. We explore whether:

• … an exiled part is holding a dream of ours we gave up long ago.
• … exiles are camped out in our symptoms, calling to us in the only language they know.
• … we sent any parts of ourselves away in order to survive in our families.
• … an important part of our being has stayed alive but hidden behind a wall of addiction.
• … we shut down bits of our aliveness so as not to threaten those around us, calling those shiny bits ‘bad’ or ‘defective‘.
• … we exiled any parts of ourselves that didn’t fit into the narrow boxes labeled ‘a real woman’, ‘a real man’.
• … exiled parts of ourselves show up in our dreams as ‘monsters’ filled with a vital energy.

As we discover our exiles, we begin to develop a relationship with them. We invite them to feast with us around a Table in the Clearing. It’s a kind of shamanic work: retrieving lost parts of the soul. But it’s more. The process of searching for exiled parts of our soul itself feeds the soul. On our search, we grow a rich, coral-like personal mythology through our dreams, drawings, and even the objects that catch our eyes.

Hokhma (Holy Wisdom) hosts our Table. She has created a sense of Self big enough to include all parts of our self and of our community, too. She holds the opposites with non-judgment.

“I am the honored one and the scorned one,” Hokhma says. “…I am strength and I am fear. I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.”

When we invite the outcasts within ourselves to come and sit around a Table where all are equal, we are simultaneously helping our society to welcome home its exiles. In fact, we make no distinction between ‘inside’ ourselves and ‘outside’ in the ‘real’ world.

Both Aramaic and Hebrew have only one preposition that describes the relationship ‘within’ the interior life and ‘among’ those in our exterior social community, explains Sufi scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz whose work helped inspire the Table.

”When ‘within’ and ‘among’ are the same word,” Douglas-Klotz writes in The Hidden Gospel, “then the way in which I treat the different voices within me—my interior ‘selves’—is always connected to the way I treat my friends, neighbors, and enemies—my exterior ‘selves.’ ”

In the Semitic language view, he adds, “there is a single community that includes everything from planets to the voices of the subconscious.”

As we treat exiled parts of ourselves kindly, we are increasingly able to bring home exiled parts of our “outer” community, recognizing them as vital parts of our wholeness. Those exiled include not only the millions in prisons and in hidden detention centers, but the ones Khalid, a ‘lifer’ at the New England prison we visit, invited to our Table in the Clearing in November 2009:

“I welcome to this Table all the people who feel themselves exiled. The homeless. The depressed. People with AIDS. Refugees from wars. The disabled. The elderly segregated away from us. All those who feel they don’t have a table to come to. I want to welcome them to this Table, to our Table.”

Encounters at our Table resonate throughout the visible and invisible worlds, for the Table is a resonant field.

Gena Corea • genovefa@sover.net • 802-257-3099
Helen Hawes • helenrhawes@gmail.com • 802-254-6881
PO Box 42 • West Dummerston, VT • 05357