Learning, Healing, and Change

An excerpt from the Introduction: As a teacher in the public school system, I developed a fascination with the many ways in which we tend to stifle communication and understanding by mistaking words for indelible truth—or even for the exact thoughts of the speaker. We treat sloppy and slippery words like precise and matter-of-fact things, and complex and layered meanings like hammers driven into nails with force. We also treat words as political tools, designed more to help one group or another get its way than to help illuminate meaning. We do not require much substantiation for words. What the President says, for example, is given more weight than what he does.  (Meanwhile, the spirit of play is irreverent towards the sanctity of words.  We often mark what we say as being playful by being tongue in cheek, saying what we do not mean.  Adults might scold children in a mock over-serious tone not to laugh.  Or we might explain to our dog that the rawhide ...

Learning is also a natural wonder, one that we possess in our being but do not have full mental possession of... There is something in nature's magnificence that inspires awe in us: a blazing sunset, star-studded sky, or giant redwood grove. Our body is also part of this natural world. It has evolved so wondrously in balance with its environment, and developed powerful abilities to heal and self-regulate. Our own human nature—as physical as it is mental, emotional, social, spiritual, and creative—is part of the natural world as well. Yet our rational human mind seems to seek less awe than a complacent sense of mastery over any field we explore. We want to say smugly, “Oh yes, I know all about that galaxy—I took an astronomy class in college.” In many ways, the body's intelligence is far greater than that of the cerebral mind, which can so easily become small or even delusional, congratulating itself on its own greatness. My mother's nursing friend long ago tol...