- Good afternoon, everyone.
We're gonna get started,
if everyone can find a seat.
Thank you.
It is marvelous.
It's wonderful to be standing here, looking at you all.
Welcome, everyone.
Welcome to Smith College.
Welcome back to Smith College, for some of you.
And very importantly, welcome to our 99th year
of our School of Social Work.
We have a rich history and tradition here,
and very shortly, we will be kicking off our centennial,
and have a number of celebrations planned.
I am Marianne Yoshioka, the dean of this school,
and I could not be more delighted to open,
officially open this 99th year of our program.
But first, I wanted to find out a little bit
about who is in the room,
so if I call out and this is you,
give if a big shout or a clap:
if you are a new, income MSW student.
(audience applauding and cheering)
If you are an incoming PhD student.
(sparse clapping)
A small, but enthusiastic group.
If you are a returning MSW student.
(harder applauding)
Yay!
If you are a returning PhD student.
(some applauding)
If you are a faculty member, an instructor, or an advisor.
(harder clapping)
If you are a staff person.
(sparse applauding) (chuckling)
Oh, thank you so much for working on a Sunday.
And if you are an alumni of the school.
(sparse clapping)
Yay!
So much careful planning goes into each year,
and probably, this year, actually, a little moreso.
And I hope you all will come to the Town Hall, tomorrow,
5:30, in this room, and we're gonna be talking
about the work of the school
since some of you last saw us in September.
You know, as we were preparing for today,
I was think about, you know,
is anything different this year than the past?
Like, for every dean who has stood,
opening up the academic year and you're thinking
about welcoming people, what's different
about this year?
And I think, in some ways, things are the same.
The school remains deeply committed
to the best clinical social work education.
We remain committed to a deep, and thoughtful,
and incisive dive into what is theory-grounded research
and pharm-formed clinical social work practice
with an anti-racism lens.
We remain committed to excellence in teaching.
We remain committed to our signature pedagogy,
case-based pedagogy.
And we remain committed to becoming
an anti-racism organization.
We remain committed to our very special
School of Social Work community.
It's very, a real beautiful thing that we build,
year after year, summer after summer.
And these commitments are unchanged,
but, yet, we are evolving in the way
that we are expressing them,
because the world is different.
The demands on clinical social workers are changing.
Clinical issues are growing more complex.
And how we navigate systems of care
is requiring new levels of our knowledges.
But I think that our programs, MSW and PhD,
do an excellent job, readying you for the roles
of leadership in clinical social work.
Knowing that the faculty, our amazing group
of instructors and advisors have developed a thoughtful
and powerful learning experience and community,
I was thinking, what are the things that I commit to?
What can I commit to bringing every day,
this summer, and for this year, and beyond?
And I thought, there are two things:
I commit to remaining engaged, to issues,
to new ways of thinking, to new knowledges,
and to each of you, individually, and as a collective.
And I am committed to compassion and love,
to remember to ask questions,
to listen, to speak my truth,
to be willing and open to listen to yours, and others
with humility and without defensiveness,
and to saying I'm sorry if I cause harm.
And today, I ask that each of us in this room
find those things that we will commit to,
bringing every day to enrich our learning community,
and to demonstrate our respect for our community.
With that being said, I want to turn
to the content of our program.
We have something very special planned,
something different.
This is a first in 99 years, for us.
We thought we would like to open our academic year
with something new.
And the wonderful new thing comes as Meg Hutchinson,
a nationally-touring songwriter, a poet
and recording artist on Red House Records.
She's released eight albums
and won numerous songwriting awards in the US
and internationally.
As a mental health advocate, and with a dedication
to mental health literacy, she's committed
to working to change the conversation about mental health.
She is currently a dean's fellow
in the Master of Divinity program at Boston University's
School of Theology, training to become
an interfaith hospital chaplain.
And it is for these reasons we have asked her
to deliver a Lydia Rapoport address at this convocation.
And it is most fitting, because Lydia Rapoport
was a social worker, an alumn of our school,
a professor, a case worker,
and an advocate of social change.
She was born in Vienna, in 1923,
and through her career, added to the theory
and knowledge on crisis intervention, and had a dedication
to community mental health consultation.
We are fortunate to have Meg here, today.
Meg educates, she advocates, she inspires, and she delights.
Please welcome Meg Hutchinson.
(audience applauding)
(soft strumming)
- I'm gonna start off with a song.
This is the song I have started many gigs
over the past 10 years or so.
It's a song that reminds me to ground myself
and take a deep breath, and remember
that the journey is a deeper one.
("Travel In" by Meg Hutchinson)
♫ Lake Michigan, Lake Erie
♫ A thatch work of fields
♫ A flock of white birds tossed to the sky
♫ I live in corners of the night
♫ Checking in and checking out
♫ And then I fly
♫ Days stacked up on days
♫ Thunder in the winter
♫ Lightning flashin' through the falling snow
♫ I sleep a shallow sleep
♫ And in the dream a little boy
♫ Runs toward the checkpoint
♫ A white flag in his hand
♫ Can I thread my coat to yours
♫ And can we turn and turn and turn
♫ Can I stitch your sadness to the wind and let it go
♫ Will you build a little cabin
♫ On your little piece of land
♫ Will you curve your body against mine and let it rest
♫ I learn the oneness of alone
♫ I learn to call this motion home
♫ Travel in, travel deep
♫ Oh, mm
♫ States stacked up on states
♫ All pressed against the highway
♫ Whole country working hard to look the same
♫ They call it an illness, that miracle spring
♫ When I leapt out of my flesh
♫ And became one with everything
♫ Can I thread my coat to yours
♫ And can we turn and turn and turn
♫ Can I stitch your sadness to the wind and let it go
♫ Can you build a little cabin
♫ On on your little piece of land
♫ Can you curve your body against mine and let it rest
♫ I learn the oneness of alone
♫ I learn to call this motion home
♫ Travel in, travel deep
♫ Hm, mm
♫ Oh
♫ Mm
♫ Oh
(audience applauding)
Hopefully I unmuted it.
I'm scanning the room for my sister.
I'm delighted and honored to be here today.
11 years ago, in June, I had a breakdown,
and was finally diagnosed with bipolar I disorder.
My sister, Tess, was two seeks
into the MSW program here at Smith.
I feel a deep gratitude, not only to be alive,
and well, and standing here,
but in particular to this school,
and to what it's meant to me to have,
as a sister, friend, and ally,
a Smith-trained social worker.
My sister's here today, or she might be running
across the campus, but she's almost here.
And some of you have already had the opportunity
to work with her in her ongoing role
as a research advisor here.
My sister always reminds me that when my breakdown began,
she really was only two weeks into the program here,
and didn't have a clue about social work.
But the fact that she'd chosen this career path
was crucial to me that summer.
And probably not as big a coincidence
as it seemed at the time.
I'm guessing that many social workers
emerge from families with undiagnosed mood disorders.
(audience chuckling)
(laughing) I hear the laughter of recognition.
Thank you, thank you for what you've already done
in your careers.
I remember, one day, she brought me to campus,
toward the end of that summer of my breakdown.
And the acute phase of my mixed state,
a state in which I was both manic
and depressed, simultaneously,
it's a special kind of hell,
was beginning to lift.
I'd been hospitalized for 21 days.
After that, I'd completed several weeks
of an out-patient day program.
I was finally able to sleep,
after about seven weeks of extreme insomnia,
but I was still depressed and anxious.
She knew I found it comforting to ride in the car,
so she brought me along on the drive
from our hometown of Great Barrington, Mass. to campus.
These were the weeks
in which I was constantly reality checking.
After you've experienced your brain malfunctioning
that severely, it's hard to figure out what's real.
It's hard to trust your perceptions.
I remember I was borrowing her shaded sunglasses that day.
The upper part of the lens was much darker than the bottom,
so the landscape kept shifting colors.
I remember feeling very confused,
and looking up, and down, and up and down,
a number of times, before asking my sister tentatively
if the glasses were actually two colors
or if I was imagining it.
She met my question, as she met all my questions
that summer, with serious consideration.
She very respectfully reassured me
that the sunglasses were in fact two shades,
and that my experience was real.
I remember walking around campus with her,
and although my social anxiety was intense,
I felt that these were friendly humans here at Smith,
people who were moving toward illness,
who would look upon me with benevolent interest.
I had the sense that people who chose this path
must have deep kindness, some knowledge of suffering
that had brought them to this moment.
So I wandered around here that day,
looking up and down in those puzzling sunglasses,
while my sister picked up some books
and introduced me to some friends.
And then we were back in the safety of her car,
where I could just ride along like a golden retriever,
staring quietly out the window.
Riding in the car was comforting.
I was moving somewhere at a moment in my life
in which I felt extremely trapped.
Someone who loved me unconditionally
was in charge of where we were going.
My sister created many errands for us
to do together that summer.
I'm glad to be here today,
with a somewhat more reliable sense of reality,
and a little less terror of people.
My lecture today is called The Courage to Remain.
Let me quickly clarify what I don't mean.
What I don't mean is that people we lose
to these illnesses are somehow less courageous.
We lose remarkably courageous people to mental illness.
We lose people, sometimes, no matter what we do,
as family members, as friends, as clinicians.
And when we lose someone to suicide,
it does not mean that anyone was less courageous.
I lost my uncle to suicide two years ago,
and he was one of the bravest people I've ever met.
We were comrades in the land of depression.
I've never met a man who could endure more pain,
nor one with quite the exuberance and raw courage.
He fought hard for a long time.
So, the courage to remain does not mean
that those who cannot remain are less courageous.
What do I mean by remain?
I mean the courage to stay with these illnesses,
to sit with these illnesses in our own brains,
or in the lives of those we treat or those we love,
for as long as we can.
The great paradox about this form of courage
is that it's actually about learning to be,
rather than to do.
It's also about keeping healthy boundaries.
My sister reminded me recently
that she actually didn't miss a single class
that summer of my breakdown.
I was really relieved to hear that.
And I think that that was actually a big part
of what allowed her to support me the way she did.
She kept doing things that she needed to do in her own life.
And taking care of ourselves is a huge part
of being able to remain with someone else.
I had a therapist, once,
a young psychiatrist in his first year of residency,
who exemplified the opposite approach.
I'd been experiencing weeks of intense anxiety.
My anxiety seemed to make him very anxious.
(audience chortles)
He began printing out anxiety questionnaires
for me to fill in.
He had trouble making eye contact.
He logged on to his computer and began looking
at medication options, suggesting we add
an atypical antipsychotic.
I expressed to him that in the past,
just talking with a therapist
had been the most effective approach.
The following week, this young resident
met me at the front desk,
with three more anxiety worksheets.
He didn't even wait for me to get into the room.
What I needed was for this therapist
to have the courage to remain in the presence
of my anxiety with some degree of self-regulation.
This is a skill that doesn't necessarily come naturally,
especially to a bright, young, motivated student
straight out of med school, in which the paradigm
is always a paradigm of taking action,
of controlling a situation.
Sometimes the very most comforting thing
to someone suffering is to stop doing
and to just be, to just remain in that space
of not knowing, alongside someone.
Trauma is so intricately tied
into so many of these illnesses.
Trauma memories surface in shards,
in fragments, in glimpses, when they surface at all.
At the heart of madness and of trauma, is not knowing.
We don't fully know our own experience,
or the experience of others.
A great deal of it unfolds in a place
that has never reached the prefrontal cortex.
All of the experience of trauma and of madness
can't be articulated.
We must learn to remain in that not knowing,
in that place that escapes language.
My sister, Tess, was able to do that for me
in my breakdown, but she was also able
to have me committed to the hospital
when I was acutely suicidal, which saved my life.
And that's the balancing act we navigate
in treating and living with these illnesses.
She's often said to me that there was just a lot
of luck and grace involved that summer.
It's true.
But what stands out to me is how she met me,
right in the madness, fearlessly.
Of course she was scared of me dying.
She was terrified of that.
But she wasn't terrified of me, or of the illness.
Tess knew how much I loved ice cream.
It was one of the first pleasures to return that summer.
So she would drive me town
and buy me gigantic chocolate and coffee ice cream cones.
Then we'd go sit on a park bench on Main Street
and watch the cars go by.
We joke that this was actually a natural EMDR session.
(audience laughing)
I just watched the cars, back and forth,
quietly eating my ice cream.
For a brief time, I found some relief.
For the first three years after my breakdown,
I relied entirely on a Western medical model.
I took my medications.
I went to therapy.
I held on.
My brain stabilized.
On the surface, I was functioning at a high level.
I signed a record deal and toured extensively.
But I was in a holding pattern.
I was holding my breath.
I felt as though I were living in the shadow
of an active volcano.
And then I met a Tibetan monk on a bike path near my house.
He turned out to be a respected lama,
and the Harvard Buddhist chaplain.
I began to visit his meditation center on Tuesday nights.
I began the terrifying task of becoming acquainted
with my own internal world, again.
I began to see that there was a possibility,
not just of controlling this illness,
but of healing in the midst of it.
There's a Buddhist saying by a great master:
because the thought of abandonment,
an achievement is not possessed,
the absence of the harm of hope and fear is amazing.
I realized that I had been narrowly confined
between these two poles of hope and fear.
As I sat on that meditation cushion on Tuesday nights
in Cambridge, I began to realize that there
was a third option.
There was an option to sit in a space that was free
of both hope and fear.
There was a ground of being, a space that was untouched,
even by my own terror and ambitions.
I would need to cultivate this space of just being,
just sitting with my raw vulnerability.
It's such a natural impulse,
when walking into any dark space,
to turn on the brightest light.
When we walk into the dark corners of worry
in our own minds, it's easier to distract ourselves,
to look at our phones, to go shopping.
When we walk into the darkness of someone else's suffering,
we try to switch on that bright spotlight of hope.
When you're in the throes of a mental illness,
someone else's bright light of hope
can actually be terrifying.
What I needed most that summer,
and what my sister gave me was company
in the midst of my darkness.
She had to abandon her own hope
in order to meet me where I was.
I had the feeling that she would love me,
even if I couldn't get better.
What I'm learning is that healing
is not heroic, or triumphant.
Healing is vulnerable.
It is a quiet and gradual process.
More like mending a giant net, one thread at a time.
It's a life-long practice.
This is a song that I wrote,
one of the very first songs after my breakdown,
when I got back to Boston.
I took the dog out to my favorite reservoir
and all those little water bugs
were skating across the surface.
And I looked out, and I could feel a sense beauty
and a sense of contact again.
And I could sense myself moving towards life,
and choosing to look up instead of down.
("Seeing Stars" by Meg Hutchinson)
♫ Bugs out on the water, make it look like rain
♫ Leaves on every tree, once again turning
♫ Summer's past but it's never far
♫ If you look real close you might see scars
♫ But me
♫ Yeah me, I'm only seein' stars
♫ Evening light on a gravel path
♫ Could be scared but I've had enough of that
♫ Oh, big old moon, rising up
♫ Even in this light you might see scars
♫ But me
♫ Yeah me, I'm only seein' stars
♫ When they take everything
♫ And you've got nothing left
♫ A deer in the headlights in your hospital bed
♫ Just dreaming of a simple life
♫ A gentle man, a solid night
♫ Me and the dog, down at the reservoir
♫ If you look real close you might see scars
♫ But me
♫ Yeah me, I'm only seein' stars
♫ Oh
♫ Seems all your songs are about leaving
♫ Seems both your hands are about now
♫ Geese up in the sky, home through the dark
♫ If you look real close you might see scars
♫ But me
♫ Yeah me, I'm only seein' stars
♫ Me
♫ Yeah me, I'm only seein' stars
(audience applauding)
That's my grand-nephew in the back,
so if you hear a kid, he's family.
(audience laughing)
I couldn't figure out why my sister
was walking in and out, and then I figured it out.
Can we keep a steady heartbeat in the face of madness?
Can we breathe deeply in a room
where someone is completely dysregulated?
For some of you,
this may have been a life-long practice already.
You may have grown up managing or surviving
the illnesses of family or friends.
I'm guessing that many of you are veterans already,
here to gain a language and a diploma
for the pain and for the wisdom you already possess.
I believe the single most powerful skill we have
is the ability to bear witness to the suffering
and healing of another human being.
Not to heal them, not to carry their suffering,
but to bear witness, without hope or fear.
When I was in-patient in the hospital 11 years ago,
one of the most frightening experiences for me
was that a part of my mind was able
to watch my brain function disintegrating
and my sense of reality fracturing.
We often make the assumption that someone
in the throes of mental illness
cannot recognize what is happening to them.
This is true in some cases,
but in many cases, the most frightening aspect
of these illnesses is that a part
of our minds can witness this brain malfunction,
and we feel helpless to stop it.
It is this witnessing mind that we must recognize
in each other.
When my sister would come to visit in the hospital,
she would look at me like the sister
she'd always known,
although my eyes were dark and glassy,
although I'd lost 15 pounds, seemingly overnight,
and had to cinch my pants on with a tiny piece of cord,
because I wasn't allowed a belt,
although my brow was in a constant furrow.
And whenever I tried to talk, I could only clear my throat.
Although I was a ghost of the kid
she'd grown up with, my sister still looked at me
like I was that person she knew and loved.
She looked at me like I was recognizable.
And in her eyes, I recognized myself, again.
Shame plays such a significant role
in activating mental illnesses.
Shame has been the most life-threatening element
of bipolar disorder, in my experience.
Shame is intertwined in such complex ways
with our intrapersonal neural biology.
the way the brain grows and is influenced
by personal relationships,
and our experience of attachment as children.
Shame occurs when contact is cut off.
The child who's been raised with insecure attachment
points that shame from those ruptures with caregivers
back at herself.
The experience of being unseen by a caregiver
is directly related to shame.
Torture studies have shown that shame,
not physical agony, is the most extreme method
of torture and creates the most suffering.
I've found shame to be the most extreme aspect
of mental illness, as well.
As future social workers and chaplains,
I urge all of us to look carefully
at the ways in which our institutions,
our prison systems, our psychiatric hospitals,
our schools perpetuate shame.
We can do better.
When we are truly seen, even by just one person,
our shame can be ameliorated.
Repairing connection is the greatest antidote to shame.
We can offer this when we remain in the darkness
with someone, when we see them in the darkness.
I've been told that laughter is also
one of the best ways to work with shame.
There were a number of people
who ameliorated my shame when I was in-patient.
One was a psych nurse who discovered
that I loved Ireland.
He'd written a book about his travels there.
He'd come home from Vietnam haunted by the war.
He flew to his ancestral home and traveled
around the island by foot for many months,
with only a donkey, telling stories, listening to stories,
healing his mind.
He spoke to me in the hospital as though
I were a fellow traveler.
There was another man who led
the weekly music therapy group.
He found out I was a musician,
and he loaned me a guitar that I was allowed
to keep in the hospital.
He trusted me with an instrument.
I couldn't trust myself with my own life,
but he trusted me with his guitar.
One social worker told me of his motorcycle accident,
and of a near-death experience.
He spoke to me like an equal.
At the close of our conversation,
which mostly consisted of me nodding,
he looked me in the eye and said,
"You're an old soul."
This has so much weight for me.
Someone was seeing something beyond my faltering biology,
beyond my scrawny, terrified body.
Someone was seeing an old soul on an ongoing journey.
The third time I was hospitalized,
the intake nurse was doing a pat-down,
to make sure I didn't have anything
I could kill myself with in my clothing.
She said, "I really like working with you, Margaret.'
So simple.
It only took one sentence to move me
from psych patient to collaborator.
It only took one sentence to give me back my dignity.
The most healing night in the hospital occurred
when this beautiful volunteer yoga instructor
named Waterfall came to our unit.
She brought a little boom box.
A small group of us sat on the floor,
and she led us in basic breathing exercises and gentle yoga.
The music was soothing.
For a moment, I wasn't homeless in my own body.
She put her hand on my back,
gently assisting me with a stretch.
No one in that building was allowed to
and/or comfortable enough to touch me, but she did.
And it made me feel less frightened of myself.
She did not see my illness as contagious.
She saw me as a person in a yoga class.
In her presence, my shame vanished.
I will never forget that night.
It was the only night in 21 days in-patient that I slept.
My sister visited me shortly after the class.
"I see you," she said.
"You're coming back."
There was a light in my eyes.
It would take me years, but eventually,
that night led to a meditation and yoga practice
that have been vital to my healing.
Not everyone brought this same compassion.
Sadly, the highest-paid people in that hospital
were the least likely to have a conversation with me.
I remember early in my diagnosis
when I was first prescribed a mood stabilizer.
I turned to the psychiatrist and said,
in a moment of lucidity,
will you tell me what's happening to my brain right now?
Will you tell me how this medication's gonna help me?
How does this work?
I'll never forget:
he looked right and me and said,
"You wouldn't understand."
Maybe he was right, but that was not the point.
What I was asking for was to be treated
as an intelligent human being,
wanting to learn about my disease.
There were so many possible answers
in that moment, but he chose the one answer
that made me feel ashamed.
My sister, Tess, was sometimes fierce with me,
especially when I was acutely suicidal,
but her ferocity was the good kind.
One of the terrifying things about depression
is that you stop being able to feel.
I'd always assumed depression felt like sadness.
But extreme depression is beyond feeling.
It's a deadness and a lack of caring.
I couldn't feel love when I was in that state,
but my sister's fierceness showed me
that I wasn't going to be abandoned.
She described it later as an almost animal protectiveness.
I could feel that.
On the day she had me committed in a small hospital
in Pittsfield, Mass.,
I remember her standing in the doorway
of the ER screening room, watching my every move.
A little side note: it was where
she was already set to start her internship that fall.
(audience chuckling)
Just a little awkward.
Hi, I'm your new co-worker, and this is my sister.
Later, it became a wonderful way
to keep the communication going.
She was able to tell the people
that had helped me how much that had meant to me.
But that day, as it became more apparent
that I wasn't going to be able to leave,
I began to feel desperate.
She knew that.
As I calculated how to run out of the building,
she stood in the doorway, ready to tackle me.
What is interesting is that it was relieving, somehow;
relieving that she knew how desperately trapped
and suicidal I felt,
relieving that she wasn't going to get me get
out of that building, because she knew if I did,
I would die.
Although she's four years younger than me,
she'd always been strong.
I remember as kids, I stopped having tussles with her
at a pretty young age.
Basically, by the time she was three years old,
she could kick my ass.
So, there was no question who was in charge.
And I knew it as a 28-year-old, that day in the hospital.
Fierceness isn't always a bad thing.
It meant she was aware of how bad things
had gotten for me.
I've been living with mental illness for 20 years now,
more than half my life.
Nine undiagnosed, and 11 in treatment.
I'm grateful that I have more years on this side
of the diagnosis, now.
Those nine years in the wilderness were hard.
I would give so much to go back in time
to that 19-year-old kid in the throes
of her first major depression.
I was raised by former hippies in the small town
of Great Barrington, Mass.
I'm the middle daughter of three girls.
I was described by my parents as a peaceful, happy kid,
the quiet, dreamy girl in the midst
of two talkative sisters.
In retrospect, I'm learning that disassociation
can look a lot like quiet and dreamy,
so verdict's out on that.
I retreated into my imagination
when the emotional environment felt confusing.
I'm only now learning a language
for what my experience was.
Understanding attachment theory
has been pivotal for me.
Insecure attachment style
and resulting internalized shame impact gene expression.
I have the biology.
I often joke that you just have
to follow the trail of guitars
through the generations to see
where the bipolar genes went.
(audience chuckling)
I've inherited my grandmother's guitar,
and more recently, my uncle's guitar.
Understanding the nurture component
isn't about placing blame.
It's about understanding how to seek out the antidotes
as an adult.
I can find a life-partner
with a secure attachment style.
Hopefully.
I'm holding out for it.
I can choose to respond to shame
by going to therapy instead of drinking.
I can find relational healing.
Understanding inter-generational trauma
has been important to me.
I'm finding a depth of compassion
for the child in my parents, and in their parents,
and for the child in myself.
There were no signs of a mood disorder until adolescence.
When I look back, I'm haunted by this photograph.
It was taken six months before that first major depression
would descend on me.
I look so happy, so innocent there, with my best friend.
By November of that year, my world
was descending into a fog.
What's heartbreaking to me
is how I didn't register it as depression.
We think we know what depression is,
but it's actually quite hard
to recognize when it's happening.
It comes on so gradually, like slowly going blind.
Every day the edges of things seem a little blurrier.
It takes a little longer to make a decision.
It's a little harder to concentrate on reading.
It's a little harder to find the words
for that college paper.
The joy slips out of the world, slowly.
The sun feels a little cooler on your skin.
And the forest seems a little starker and less familiar.
The smells of wood smoke or of dinner on the stove
don't illicit any longing.
The eyes of other people seem probing,
and too close for comfort.
The songs on the radio don't stir you.
Bed becomes a battlefield.
It's the place that does not give you rest,
but it's the place you struggle to emerge from each morning.
After a night of insomnia, the blankets feel heavier.
The day seems daunting.
The urge is to burrow deep down under that comforter
and let the day go by without you.
Depression comes on so gradually
that it's hard to name.
The shame accompanies it, so the impulse to hide is strong.
For a classic overachiever, someone who'd been
at the top of my class and excelled at sports,
the fact that getting out of bed was hard
brought on a deep fear of failing.
Love had always felt contingent on success,
on making my family proud.
But here I was, lying in my bed,
wondering how on Earth I'd get up
and walk across the hall to take a shower.
I decided it must be mono,
or chronic fatigue, or fibromyalgia.
I was having a lot of muscle aches and nerve pain.
I didn't think of depression as a physical illness.
I thought of it as a mental state
that only got the best of weak people.
I had too much willpower.
It couldn't be depression.
Secretly, I longed for cancer.
Cancer would get me out school,
would get me out of everyone's expectations.
I went to the doctor and got tested for things.
I did not allude to depression.
I did not consider therapy.
Therapy wasn't something we needed in our family.
Those were my mother's exact words.
The tests all came back negative.
It was growing more and more clear to me
that I would barely be able to limp through that semester.
And I couldn't conceive of starting another.
My best friend was beginning to struggle
with a serious drug addiction around that same time.
My fear of losing her began to haunt me,
in my already sleepless nights.
I came up with a desperate plan.
I needed a way to get out of school.
I needed a way to get her away from drugs.
With bonds my grandparents had given me
for my education, I bought us plane tickets to Greece,
and took the semester off.
Terrible idea.
(audience titters)
But it got me far away from anyone
who would know how bad it was getting.
My friend was too sick to see how sick I was.
We had a story, now, for everyone back home.
We were spending a semester abroad.
We were sending pretty postcards from Greek islands.
Most of the time, I was just lying in bed.
I remember drinking beer in bed,
and watching Xena the Warrior Princess
with bad Greek voiceover.
I remember sitting out in some corner cafe,
watching everyone go by and envying them
their sense of place in the world.
I felt that there was nowhere I belonged anymore,
like the one puzzle piece that didn't fit into the puzzle.
There I was, in one of the most beautiful places
in the world, but I couldn't feel anything anymore.
When we returned to the US, neither of us was better,
but people left me alone.
I had the rest of the semester off.
My boyfriend thought I was with my college friends.
My college friends thought I was with my boyfriend.
In the space that left, I had a lot of time alone.
The months dragged on.
I think I watched every drama in the local video store.
I thought I was becoming a film buff.
At one point, my older sister used that word: depression.
It was the most insulting thing she could have said to me,
because it was true, and I thought depression
was for weak people.
The only bright side of all my isolation
was that in my time alone, I began to write songs.
Songwriting for the next 20 years,
would be one of the primary ways
for me to express what I was feeling.
For years before diagnosis, my songs
were the only place I could speak
about what was actually happening to me.
It's amazing, listening back,
that I could write these songs
without consciously owning them.
I also chopped off all my hair when I got back.
It's a startling contrast, when I look at that picture
compared to that graduation photo.
By summer, the depression began to lift.
The world returned to me as gradually
as it had slipped away.
The fields grew bright again.
The sunlight on my skin began to feel warm.
My limbs felt light.
My heart seemed to beat more strongly.
I began to crave and taste food, again.
I began to get out of bed more easily in the morning.
The world seemed stunningly beautiful,
as color, and sound, and smell returned.
I thought the worst was over.
I thought I'd survived some perilous coming-of-age,
some rite of passage.
I did not know that these bouts of depression
would return almost annually
in the nine years that followed.
And increasingly on the heels
of these ever-deeper depressions,
I would begin to experience months of euphoria,
creativity, spiritual bliss, romance, travel,
also known as undiagnosed hypomania.
This is part of the reason it took me nine years
and a breakdown to finally understand I needed help.
Hypomania is enchanting.
Each time the hypomania brought me higher,
and each time, I became convinced
that the worst was behind me.
Why seek help when everything was better
than it had ever been before?
I would fall in love, write an album-worth of songs,
become social, and funny, and charismatic, and confident.
I would over-commit to things, exist on less sleep,
feel a deep, mystical sense of connection
with the natural world.
Sometimes, I would feel
an almost indescribable spiritual bliss.
I kept a lot of this secret.
The thing about hypomania is it can look fun,
and it can be fun to be around.
Most people didn't notice it as illness.
I chose friends who were out-of-balance, also,
friends who liked to drink and laugh too loudly,
so I wouldn't stand out.
But during these spiritual times,
I also appeared very calm on the outside,
like someone on a drug trip.
You can sometimes be extremely high, chemically,
but appear subdued.
I never got manic enough to lose complete control,
so these bouts of euphoria went undiagnosed,
until the breaking point.
My sisters later admitted to me their nickname
for me is Marge, and they later admitted
that they coined a term during
that final hypomanic phase, which was the Marge-alog.
And they said that I would call them up
and talk for two hours straight,
without asking them any questions.
And eventually, they stopped picking up the phone.
(chuckles) But I didn't really realize it, 'til later.
The breaking point in June, 2006
is somewhat textbook when I look back.
It was a perfect recipe for a bipolar break.
I was 28 years old.
My music career was taking off.
I was on tour in Europe with three other bands.
The lifestyle was out of control:
drinking and smoking pot, barely sleeping.
But everyone around me was just as high,
so I didn't notice.
The time change, the season, the lack of sleep,
the alcohol were all perfect triggers for mania.
I was higher than I'd ever been before.
I fell in love, or so I thought,
with a firefighter in London.
He showed up in Boston 10 days after I returned from tour.
One of the most frightening things
about hypomania, in retrospect,
was how off my judgements were.
I didn't notice all the warning signs
of a dangerously-possessive and unstable man.
I thought it was love,
because when you're that high,
you fall in love with everyone.
When I got home to Boston, I was exhausted.
I began to spiral downhill quickly
into what I would later learn was that mixed state
in which I was both manic and depressed.
Suddenly, it wasn't a Hollywood movie, anymore.
Suddenly, this man seemed intense and frightening.
He wouldn't let me out of his sight.
The exhaustion and the pressure wore me down quickly.
We were planning to drive cross-country,
a plan that had seemed wonderful just a few weeks earlier.
But suddenly, I couldn't figure out
how my washing machine worked.
I was down in the laundry room,
and the knobs didn't make any sense to me.
I had to stand there for a while.
Then I would try to pack my suitcase,
but I couldn't figure out how to do that.
What season was it?
How long would I be gone?
How many shirts did I need?
And which shirts should I choose?
Decision-making, as my family will attest,
has never been my strong suit,
and they were the very first skills I lost.
I wondered if I had early-onset Alzheimer's.
I was trying to show the firefighter around Boston,
but I kept getting lost.
I was turning down the wrong streets in my own neighborhood
because I couldn't remember for minutes at a time,
where I was.
It was terrifying.
He was terrifying.
I gathered up my courage and told him
I thought something was really wrong with my brain,
and I really needed to go home
to my family to get some help.
I bought him a plane ticket.
He became violent.
He wouldn't let me leave.
When it's hard to work the washing machine,
it's even harder to protect yourself.
It's taken me a long time to understand that.
I escaped at five a.m.
My dog and I raced out, and with this final burst
of adrenaline, I was able to get on the Mass. pike
and head straight west to my mom's house,
to my childhood home.
When investigating the catalysts for psychosis,
Henri Michaux describes a pivotal chasm moment.
Edward Podvoll writes about this chasm:
"The wound that leads to madness
"is a dislocating wound, from life, family,
"relationships, and what has always been important.
"Control of the mind is overrun, sometimes annihilated
"by the sweeping mental acceleration.
"The chasm is the fragmentation of one's experience.
"Each wound carries within it the same ominous potentiality
"for exaggerated attempts at self-fixation,
"a trademark of psychotic excitement.
"The chasm situation is caused by a shock,
"or a trauma, or any number of experiences,
"but when this chasm moment occurs,
"the mind simply cannot recalibrate."
When I reached my hometown,
my hippie family leapt into action.
My big sister took me to her house,
and cooked me warm food, and made me a bed,
and took care of my dog.
There was Rescue Remedy, valerian root tea,
salt baths, nature walks.
My parents wrote me beautiful poems.
My mom had been preparing a guest sermon
for her Unitarian Church
about the power of positive thinking.
She read me quotes for days.
My father came over and sat with me on the back porch.
I could hear him tell my mother,
"Looks like she's been on a bad acid trip."
At least hippies understand what that's like.
I remember feeling kind of relieved
that they had some frame of reference.
My dad said he knew just what would help me.
He took me out to his favorite pond,
down a long dirt road, and showed me a blue heron.
He held up his binoculars.
I stood there, paralyzed.
I had no idea how the blue heron was gonna help me.
And then my sister came home from Smith.
I still couldn't sleep, and my brain was accelerating,
in faster and faster loops,
racing at a manic pace while my body
became more and more depressed, and dysregulated.
A mixed state feels like two weather systems colliding,
the mania and depression crashing into each other,
on the landscape of that fractured brain.
Tess could tell how suicidal I was.
I couldn't say it outright, but she was unafraid
to address it, directly.
This is one of the best things she did for me that summer.
She spoke directly and in detail about suicide.
She spoke of all the ways it would go wrong.
I believed her.
I was grateful that someone knew
exactly how badly I wanted to die.
Death was all I could think about, 24 hours a day.
I'd always thought suicide was a choice people make,
but what I felt that summer was this primal urge.
My brain was directing me to do anything necessary
to turn off the suffering.
It was like being trapped in a burning building.
You don't jump because you wanna die.
You jump because staying in the building is more painful.
It was a primal impulse to escape.
My sisters decided it was time for the hospital.
I agreed.
This is my friend, Sergeant Kevin Briggs.
And the man standing on the railing is Kevin Berthia.
And they are now excellent friends,
but they met on a very difficult day.
And I first heard about Kevin Briggs
in a New Yorker article in 2003.
And he'd saved hundreds of people
from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
And they asked him, how do you do that?
What do you do at that moment?
He's a very humble man, and he said,
"I just introduce myself, you know,
"not Sergeant Briggs, like 'Hi, I'm Kevin.
"'How are you feeling?'
"'What are your plans for tomorrow?'"
And then, he stands there.
Sometimes he stands there for seven hours.
And he listens.
He doesn't give orders.
He doesn't tell them he knows how they feel
or about his own life.
He doesn't tell them they can't jump.
He just stands there.
And that's enough, in all of those hundreds of cases,
to keep someone hanging on.
So, I wrote a song called Gatekeeper,
and I, right after I read that article,
and I didn't realize that I had bipolar disorder,
but my song has realized it, of course.
And later, somehow the song ended up in California.
Some friend heard it and brought it to him,
and we've become good friends since.
I got the chance to go out and meet him a few years ago.
I'll send this out to all of you, as gatekeepers,
and uh, just send you all my best in those future moments
when you might find yourself also standing beside someone.
("Gatekeeper" by Meg Hutchinson)
♫ When the day has grown too long
♫ The hour's standing still
♫ You wonder if you could, if you will
♫ With your toes upon the edge, with your eyes upon the sky
♫ Tell me just these things before you fly
♫ How are you feelin'
♫ What are your plans for tomorrow
♫ Will you let me make some
♫ And after, you can do as you will
♫ If your hand should lose the rail
♫ If your heel should lose the cord
♫ Will everything seem fixable that did not before
♫ How the sun shines on the bay
♫ The islands over there
♫ Can make it through today, if you dare
♫ How are you feelin'
♫ What are your plans for tomorrow
♫ Will you let me make some
♫ And after, you can do as you will
♫ Maybe every day in ordinary ways
♫ We hold each other on
♫ We keep each other here
♫ Oh, maybe every day in ordinary ways
♫ We hold each other on
♫ We keep each other here
♫ Mm
♫ How are you feelin'
♫ What are your plans
♫ How are you feelin'
♫ Oh, what are your plans
♫ What are your plans
(audience applauding)
(tuning guitar)
So, to make a very long story short,
I was hospitalized three times,
and when I got out, I did an out-patient day program
for several weeks.
It was not the best, most well-funded program.
I remember the highlight for me
was the free doughnuts everyday.
We did a lot of cutting pictures
out of travel magazines and we had our glitter
and our glue sticks, you know?
And we make collages about all of our finest qualities.
Just a little, I was kind of a snob,
you know, creative snob.
It was a little interesting,
but I got out,
and we finally found a medication
that would make me sleep.
When you haven't been able to sleep
in almost seven weeks, it's a miracle when you do, again.
I remember my first dreams so vividly.
The first night I slept, I had a dream
that I was a refugee, and I was fleeing
up this gray mountain path,
and I had all my belongings on my back,
and there were hundreds of fellow refugees,
and we had the brightest clothing on
against this gray mountain.
And in the dream, I knew I had survived.
And I woke up, and I thought,
I'm going to survive.
And the next night, I had a dream
that I was running through the most lush
and brilliant forest.
And I ran so fast that my feet lifted off the trail.
And I started to fly.
And this is the song that came out of those dreams.
("Home" by Meg Hutchinson)
♫ I won't tell you where I've been
♫ Only that it's so good to be home
♫ It's possible to go so far down
♫ As some of you might already know
♫ Did you go there, too
♫ I won't tell you what I've seen
♫ Only that this world can be so mean
♫ Brave souls shufflin' up and down the halls
♫ No one visits, no one even calls
♫ Did you wait there, too
♫ But I've been getting better these days
♫ And I've been sleepin' in my own bed again
♫ I've been dreaming in full color
♫ Oh, goodbye. sorrow
♫ I've found another way
♫ I won't tell you what I would've done
♫ If not for my dearest ones
♫ Chemistry can sorta leave you in the lurch
♫ I'm just glad they found a cure
♫ Did you find one, too
♫ 'Cause I've been getting better these days
♫ And I've been sleepin' in my own bed again
♫ I've been dreamin' in full color
♫ Oh, goodbye, sorrow
♫ I've found another way
♫ But if the world should really pale
♫ Dark night of the soul is real
♫ Let me offer I've been there
♫ Then one day, that darkness clears
♫ 'Cause I've been getting better these days
♫ And I've been sleepin' in my own bed again
♫ I've been dreamin' in full color
♫ Oh, goodbye, sorrow
♫ I've found another
♫ Goodbye, goodbye, oh, goodbye
♫ I've found another, I've found another
♫ 'Cause I've been getting better these days
♫ And I've been sleepin' in my own bed again
♫ I've been dreamin' in full color
♫ Oh, goodbye, sorrow
♫ I've found another way
♫ To stay
(audience applauding)
So, a few closing words and then we're all gonna go
to the barbecue in the rain.
(audience tittering)
That week I had the dreams
was also the week in late August
when my sister, Tess, took me whale watching
off the coast of Cape Cod.
It was something we'd always loved as children.
I will remember that evening forever,
as the moment where the will to live returned.
We'd been on many whale watches as children,
but this night was extraordinary.
Three whales stayed with the boat,
leaping, breeching, splashing the water,
and falling back into the ocean,
salt spray splashing up into the wind.
They seemed to know how funny they were.
They seemed to be playing with us.
I stood at the rail with my sister,
laughing for the first time in what felt like years.
I could feel the sun on my skin.
I could see the brilliant golds and purples
of the sunset sky.
I could feel my sister's love for me,
and my love for her.
I could feel myself wanting to stay in this world.
The 11 years since have been hard work.
I've learned to see living with bipolar disorder
as a life-long practice.
It's humbling.
It's frustrating.
And when I feel positive shifts happen,
it's incredibly rewarding.
I've been diligent.
I've been fortunate to respond well to medication.
I've been in therapy for 11 years.
I've developed a yoga and meditation practice.
I've filled my grandma-sized pill box
with fish oil and vitamin D, multivitamins,
probiotics, and the mood stabilizer.
I had someone ask me recently,
can you still cry on medication?
I got a good laugh out of that.
You bet I can.
I've cried a lot.
I love the research.
I don't have time to get into it now,
but Richard Davidson and what neuroscientists are doing
to show us how the brain is changed by meditation
is one of my very favorite discussion points in the world.
So, look up Richie Davidson, if you don't know him already.
It took a long time to find a good therapist.
I took what the system assigned to me
and I did my very best to be a straight-A patient.
But in 2013, I finally got matched
with a wonderful therapist.
It was the first time that I didn't feel
like a patient in that clinic.
It was the first time where a clinician
did not treat emotions as part of my illness,
but rather as part of my humanness.
I was finally safe enough to begin to grieve.
I think I cried in about 2/3 of my sessions with her,
because for the first time, I wasn't ashamed
to be vulnerable.
I cried, and cried.
I cried for things for things I'd never addressed
in my childhood.
I cried for all those years I'd hidden my illness.
I cried for what I went through
that triggered the breakdown.
I cried for what I felt I'd missed out on,
because of the illness.
I cried and cried.
And she never once suggested I add a new medication,
because she was smart enough to know the difference
between illness and humanness.
When I was treated in all my dimensions,
I was allowed to bring my whole self into those sessions.
What she mirrored back to me was myself
as a courageous, vulnerable, lovable,
good-enough human being.
She had the courage to bear witness
to what I couldn't even find words for, yet.
She had the courage to remain in that small room with me,
in the silences, and in that unknowable fragmented space
that surrounds trauma.
She was able to be comfortable
with what was unknowable in her own experience.
She wasn't trying to fix anything, or cover anything up.
She wasn't turning on that glaring, bright light
of hope in the midst of my dark room.
She was just being, alongside me,
fearlessly in the dark, much as my sister had.
It's more important than ever
that we protect and esteem this practice of just being.
As we live and give care in the shadow
of the DSM-5, as we face the ever-growing demands
and restrictions by insurance companies,
the faltering health care system,
the rise of mental illnesses,
the voluminous paperwork, the quotas
for how many patients to see per hour,
we must push back.
We must push back in every way we know how.
We must defend what is at the very heart of healing:
human presence and time.
It takes time to bear witness,
to listen through the silence.
If all we're doing is diagnosing, we're not bearing witness.
There is a time for both.
We must be given the time for both.
It's the rushed pace, the impersonalization,
and the pressures of our modern world
that fuel these illnesses.
The antidote is not just medicine.
It's human connection.
It's the things Carl Rogers told us decades ago.
The three conditions of growth-promoting
therapeutic relationships: congruence,
unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
As caregivers, we have the opportunity
to provide regulation for the care-seeker,
through our physical presence, the steadiness of our breath,
the compassion in our eyes, and in our body.
For patients who may have never given a healthy mirror
in their childhoods, or in their partnerships,
we can reflect back to them a deep recognition
of the reality of their experience.
When internalized, this compassion we reflect
can be integrated as self-compassion.
Self-compassion is one of the greatest medicines available.
And as Carrie Doehring states,
perhaps the greatest catalyst for change.
"When we reflect to someone the depth
"of their pain, their goodness, their courage,
"their lovability, we empower them
"to become agents in their own healing.
"This does not necessarily mean recovering from illness,
"but rather healing in the midst of it."
As a hospital chaplain, I'm learning
that there's even such a thing as healing
in the midst of dying.
Dan Siegel writes,
"We can see that there is,
"in every organism, at whatever level,
"an underlying flow of movement
"toward constructive fulfillment
"of its inherent possibilities."
Rogers calls this the actualizing tendency.
Rogers writes,
"There's an evolutionary tendency
"toward greater order, greater complexity,
"greater interrelatedness existing in all organisms,
"and even in the development of galaxies.
"The more complex the system, the greater its potential
"for self-transcendence.
"Its parts cooperate to reorganize it."
This gives me courage.
Courage is not hope.
The Latin root, cour, means heart.
Brene Brown writes,
"Courage originally meant to speak one's mind
"by telling all one's heart."
Over time, this definition has changed,
and today, courage is more synonymous
with being heroic.
Brene writes, "Heroics are important,
"and we certainly need heroes.
"but I think we've lost touch with the idea
"that speaking honestly and openly
"about who we are, about what we're feeling,
"and about our experiences, good and bad,
"is the definition of courage.
"Heroics are often about putting our life on the line.
"Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability
"on the line.
"In today's world, that's pretty extraordinary."
Mark Twain wrote,
"Courage is not the absence of fear,
"it's acting in spite of it."
I think Twain was missing something important.
I would suggest a rephrasing.
Courage is not the absence of fear,
it is about remaining in the face of it.
Sometimes, that means not acting.
Thank you for choosing to become social workers.
We need your resilience and your whole-hearted-ness,
your passion, your ferocity,
and your courage to remain in the silences,
and in the not-knowing, now, more than ever before.
Push back.
Push back against all the forces
that would restrict a medicalized care-giving,
and reduce it to charts and insurance claims,
and to the newest treatment model.
Preserve what is most unknowable,
most unmeasurable, and most effective about care giving:
compassion, time, and a steady heart.
Thank you.
(audience applauding heartily)
- Thank you, so much, that was,
I have goosebumps and I think I will for a while.
Meg is willing to take a few questions.
And before we part, if anyone would like to ask or comment.
- There's never been a question
that I consider off-bounds, so don't be shy.
Or if you're hungry, just get up and go.
Self care, self care. (laughing)
Yes? (no mic pickup)
It's an ongoing process.
I feel like each time I get to another layer of healing,
I feel brave enough to go a little further
into the story.
I was terrified to speak openly, 'til 2011.
So, quite a number of years after my breakdown.
I was able to write about it in my songs,
but that felt safe, 'cause I'd been doing that forever.
And the thought of getting up on a stage
without my guitar and just talking was terrifying.
But people were listening.
They were paying attention to the songs.
And in 2011, I was asked to speak for the first time,
without my guitar, and it,
oh, it was terrifying.
I scared for weeks before,
and you know, my brain was just like lighting up
with all of the trauma circuits.
But what changed is when I looked out,
I could tell that it was being useful.
And I thought, if there's some way
to turn that terror into something useful,
then I owe it, you know?
'Cause when I was going through that,
there just weren't enough stories.
There weren't enough people my age writing about it.
And so people gave me the courage to do it, over time.
And the story, you know, depending on who I'm talking to,
the different elements of the story come out.
I discouraged my parents from coming today,
'cause I knew I wanted dive into attachment theory,
which we haven't addressed, yet.
(all laughing)
So, you know, it's a constantly-evolving story.
But, obviously today, the anchor-point
for me was just how incredible the timing was
to be on campus 11 years later,
in the same month, with my sister sitting here.
So that was, I got really excited about that.
Yeah, thank you.
Anyone else?
Yeah.
(no mic pickup)
So I just finished my second year of divinity school.
I've got one more to go,
but I did my first summer-long internship
at Brigham and Women's, and whew, they throw you right in.
Two weeks into it, you're doing the overnights by yourself,
and I'm going, I don't know enough about religion.
You know?
Turns out, you don't really need
to know a lot about religion.
You need to know how to sit still.
And because people had modeled that so well for me,
I felt like I had a starting point.
But that chaplaincy feels like
its the one terrain that they haven't put the quotas on,
there's less paperwork,
it's like the one little safe haven
where you're still allowed to sit in a room,
you know, for an hour and a half, if someone needs that.
I don't know that it's gonna stay that way,
but it felt to me like a way to kinda sneak
into the system and try to carve out some of that space.
And in some way, try to give back
what I felt people had given me.
So, I'm learning.
I got a long ways to go, but it's been fun.
It's fun to go back to school.
Anyone else?
Hm?
(no mic pickup)
I joke that it was a really good approach
to a midlife crisis, you know?
But all along, I had felt that the people
that spoke to me like a soul on a deeper spiritual journey,
not just a patient going through an illness,
had given me dignity.
And it didn't matter what faith tradition
they were talking to me, out of.
You know, a woman gave me a CD of Christian music,
and I kind of identified as Buddhist,
and I was just so touched that she gave me
something spiritual and saw that that would help me,
that I just listened to that CD all summer.
And of course, three years into my recovery,
when I met the Tibetan lama and started studying,
that's where I finally was able
to really feel some of the change happening, internally.
And I feel like the healing was so much a part
of the spiritual journey, that I feel like
that was something I wanted to lift up.
Yes?
(no mic pickup)
I mean, I've just, I feel like we need
everything we can get.
And there's just so much wisdom and so much help
in both of those traditions.
And I feel like what I hear a lot of the time
is this polarized conversation, like it's one or the other,
and that you're betraying one system by embracing the other.
And certainly I came up against it in my own family.
Of this, we're homeopathic, and we can do it
with poetry and kale, you know?
(audience laughing)
But that's not enough, you know?
It's great in the years since.
Like once I got on a mood stabilizer,
kale and poetry, man, those have been
like really, really important.
But you have to embrace both worlds,
and I think it was nice to come back to a more holistic.
I was certainly lucky to be raised
in a very holistic way, and to come back to that.
That's where the healing happened.
You know, there was stabilization, which is important,
but I felt like I was kinda frozen
for those first three years.
I was just like diligently hanging on,
but nothing was really changing inside me.
And I felt like I needed a spiritual teacher
and a spiritual community to go and sit with myself.
It's pretty scary after feeling that lost
in a breakdown.
It's pretty scary to sit with yourself,
and having a spiritual framework for that.
And spirituality, man, the language is all about that.
Right?
It's all about getting into that darkness,
and that richness, and moving through it.
So that just felt really important.
And then once you learn the science,
that your brain, structure and function
can change after just a few weeks of mediation.
You just think, how can we not do this?
You know, it has to be in the midst of all of this.
So it's another thing we have to push for.
'Cause obviously there's not a lot of money
behind those trials, you know?
Meditation doesn't profit anyone
except for the meditator.
It's a little tricky.
- Well, I'll bring our evening to a close.
Of course, I think one question
that's on everyone's mind, is if Tess arrived?
Your sister? - Yes, she was here,
the whole time, with her grandson.
And they're running around somewhere.
- Oh, well, we'll for sure look for her.
But thank you on behalf of all of us.
I think you have, I feel like you have fed our soul.
And it's a really great, wonderful way
to kick off this year.
Thank you, so much. (audience applauding)
- My pleasure, thank you.
There she is.
(speech drown out by applause)
I just want to embarrass my sister for a minute.
(no mic pickup)
Oh, we love you.
(audience applauding)
Thank you, and thank you to Don Harris,
and wonderful sound.
Thank you guys for driving all the way here.
Thank you.