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• Click here to read a chapter excerpted from Possible Futures: Creative Thinking for the Speed of Life, a new book by Jude Treder-Wolff which will be published in 2008 by Networks Press.

Lifestage provides workshops, groups, and training seminars focused on creativity and the healing process, holistic approaches to personal health and well-being, and the intersection of individual and society.

turning points

The scene: A psychodrama and group psychotherapy training workshop intensive, conducted by a highly-respected trainer.

The situation: We have been assigned the task of creating an on-the-spot warm-up exercise for a group. Be spontaneous, but use what we have learned.

My dilemma: I am standing in front of this group of twenty-odd colleagues, some of whom are brilliant and a bit intimidating, and here's the thing: My mind is blank.

I am supposed to be speaking. People are staring at me, patient and trusting. But I have nothing. Nadda. No ideas, not even a hint. Time seems to slow down. The anxiety is overwhelming. So I take action. I drop to the floor of the stage. I lie there with eyes closed. Still nothing. Now my heart is pounding, because I've started something here and it has to go somewhere or I risk total humiliation. I begin to roll around on the floor of the stage, eyes still closed, mind still blank. I pretend to be in a deep sleep, and having a nightmare. Finally my mind clicks on. All in the same moment, I make a decision to sit up and open my eyes. I tell the group that I just fell asleep and while sleeping, had a dream. I say that they were all in the dream, in which I was standing in the middle of Yankee Stadium all by myself and they were all hiding in various places in the stadium. With that I tell them to - right now - find their hiding place. Everyone scatters and creates their spot. I "find" one person, and together we "find" another, until everyone is out of hiding. Then we discuss:

• How did you like your hiding place?
What were you hiding from?
• What was it like to be found?

This experience was over 30 years ago but I remember it with intensity still today because it was for me a turning point. In this encounter with anxiety and public exposure of my self-doubt, I made a shift. It was perhaps the first time I consciously, knowingly allowed my emotions and inner struggle to guide me rather than shut them down or cover them up. The success of that experience was confirmation that my efforts to challenge old ways of thinking - which often seemed to be plodding along going nowhere - were paying off. I could feel I was on a new road.

As a psychotherapist and a trainer of both healers and teachers, it is my privilege to help people navigate some of the most significant - also the scariest and most high-stakes - changes in their thinking and their lives.

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FEATURED ARTICLE FROM MAY LIVES IN PROGRESS E-NEWSLETTER.

"COSMIC WINKS" by

Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP

It is said that Carl Jung came up with the idea of synchronicity during a dinner conversation with Albert Einstein in the 1920,s. If true it stands to reason. Jung believed that synchronicity - defined as "meaningful coincidences" or two seemingly unrelated events connected by virtue of a common meaning - occurred because there is a unified field of consciousness, "a fusion of inner and outer reality" in which all past and future coexist.i Einstein's relativity speaks to the inter-connected whole, and synchronicity to those moments the cosmos "winks" at us through unexpected, mysterious, seemingly magical connections showing up between people and events. These moments are described as deeply personal, "boundary events" which often occur at periods of major life transitions, attention-grabbers through which we find the strength to endure those times when growth means slogging through a thick fog on an uncertain path. The creative process of change is like that sometimes. Here is an example.

Wandering through the Union Square Green Market in Manhattan one Wednesday afternoon, I ran into an old friend from college. It was April, 1983, almost a year into my first professional job, and I should have been thrilled to see another Midwestern transplant. After all, she was someone who knew the old me, before reality bitch-slapped my idealism, and before my student loan debts came due and I needed a second job to make enough money to stay at the professional job long enough to figure out my life. But thrilled I was not. I felt obligated, trapped into an artificial show of warmth. I was in no mood.

Any other Wednesday at that time I would have been at work, wrapping up morning groups. I was a creative arts therapist on a psychiatric unit in a Newark medical hospital, and my last-minute decision to take a personal day from work had so far had done nothing to shake off the sense of futility that overwhelmed me on there. The gloom of the place darkened my thoughts well into the night, like the claustrophobic gray walls- air so thick with cigarette smoke you could write in it-dimmed our spirits during the day.

Here is what I was thinking when I spotted my old college friend: "what does it say about me that I am burned out after less than a year in my first professional job?" So I did not want conversation about how I was doing and what is new. All I could do was whine that professional life felt sadly like a fool's errand, and that college now seemed a fool's paradise. But there she was, and she seemed so happy to see me, and then there we were in a diner having coffee, going over our appointment books to make dinner plans, when she pointed to a date marked "anniversary."

"What is it called? Who wrote it?" I demanded. She went on to describe exactly where she was - at Webster's Bookstore on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee, near the University of Wisconsin where we had been students at the time - and what she was wearing. She remembered exactly what time of day it was - 3 p.m. - and that she often had a drop in energy around then, so she wanted to stop at the Coffee Trader, just a block or so from the bookstore, for a cup of coffee-flavor of the day: hazelnut - and that flavored coffees were sexy back then but now they were just kind of sad.

"What was the book?" I asked. "I can't remember," she said. "You say a book changed your life but you can't remember the name of it," I said. "You're not listening," she whispered.

Now, I did not say to her that listening is what I do better than anything. I did not, at that moment tell her that listening to a rotating group of mentally ill patients when there is no one else around to do it requires epic degrees of attention and empathy if not actual skill, although it seemed petty and dramatic to say how defensive and irritated I felt at her simple accusation.

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