Jill Pasquinelli writes: “Surrender to the Unknown” in The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter, issue Number 81, Summer 2013:

Guidance: priorities of the Spirit, Soul and Body

We never really know what brings someone to us for a Jin Shin Jyutsu session. It’s usually a condition or symptom, something that we don’t want, but there’s something else underlying that, something unspoken, unidentified, not yet seen or known. Maybe it’s the soul calling us back to ourselves.

One thing I know for sure is the healing process is one of mystery, it’s movements often unpredictable, taking us to unforeseen places and foreign territories only unfamiliar because we don’t  recognize them as our own landscape. There is no one path or clear path or a path at all really, just the one we are making while we travel this vast terrain of the psyche and soul. I think it’s the soul’s journey. When we’re in this kind of movement of our entire being, we often wrestle with this unknown and unfamiliar place, wanting what is familiar, wanting things to be clear and certain, ordered and predictable but that’s not usually how the process of transformation goes. We can’t see clearly because we’re inside of the experience, it’s being revealed to us as we experience it. There’s also no timeline, no way to know when we’ll be out of this, but whether we surrender or fight it, at some point we emerge from this place and it’s as if the light shines on us so we can reorient ourselves, have some perspective, have an authentic experience of who we are now, and yet we recognize we are unfinished.

This is the movement of our life. What calls us, whether it’s a loss, an illness, a memory, a birth, a death, whatever it may be.

I think of my client who came to see me because she had liver cancer and was given a six month prognosis. Rita was a nun and had a deep spiritual life but struggled with depression. Something was missing for her. I treated Rita for four and a half years. She was a closet poet, and often we would start her sessions with a poem she had written. She confessed to me that the prognosis the doctors had given her “was always on the back burner” as she put it. In the face of her fears and struggles I watched Rita blossom over the years. She began having public poetry readings, and this guided her into leading prayer groups in her community. As she was helping others and an inspiration to all of us, she took a big leap and did something she had always wanted to do, which was get her Master’s in psychology. I watched and witnessed Rita becoming more herself, moving into an inherently earned freedom as she navigated the unknown, finding herself along the way, living and expressing the beauty that was Rita. As she was moving into the dying process, one day she said to me “Jill, this has been the happiest and best four and a half years of my life. I found what was missing, and it was me!” We both cried, we both came to understand she was free from the past and the future. It didn’t matter anymore, she was whole. She could let go of her life easily and she did.

To be continued…