“Blood Moments” in Psychotherapy

“Your intelligence grows new leaves in the wind of this listening”     ….Rumi 

“Moments of meeting”  are special moments of now in which there is a profound sense of mutual connection.    The prototypical moment of meeting is the one that occurs in the first moments after birth, when the new baby looks into the eyes of a mother who is looking back.   Such moments of special intimacy in psychotherapy are a vital aspect of  the healing connection.

These moments  have also been termed blood moments, a description which derives from the native American ritual in which two members of a tribe mixed their blood in celebration of bonding as brothers. By this metaphor, we can understand a blood moment as an “intersubjective now moment” in which two individuals co-mingle their most vital essence.

Applying the idea of a blood moment to the psychotherapeutic encounter also carries the meaning that real feelings and actions are taking place between real people in real time.

Last but not least, because blood is a quintessential element in birth, the term “blood moment” is also well suited to express the meaning that something new is being born.

From my point of view, psychotherapeutic blood moments are those in which new aspects of self come into being.

—excerpt from Marjorie Schuman, Ph.D.  Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis: Inquiring Deeply.   Routledge Press, 2017.    

What is “Inquiring Deeply?”

Deep inquiry—  “Inquiring Deeply”— is awareness practice focused on deepening your understanding of your emotional life.  Deep emotional understanding is more than simply mindfulness.   It is intuitive understanding grounded in personal history, embodied experience, and the felt sense of things.   The emphasis in deep inquiry is on exploring the field of relational connection with others.

“Inquiry” means to live in the question of something, on and off the cushion; to consciously engage your experience in a way which invites it to unfold. When you ‘inquire deeply’ into a problem or concern, you approach your experience with the attitude of delving into it, feeling whatever it is more fully, and inviting it to reveal itself.  

Inquiry explores your relationship with other people and expands to include your relationship with life itself. Through this self-reflective awareness practice, you become more fully who you are.

Problems as Koans of Everyday Life

Koans are riddles or paradoxes used for contemplative meditation.  Their purpose is to invite a profound shift in one’s experience of the world.   A well known example is  “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”  Koans do not have answers nor make logical sense, and that is the point of them:  to boggle the mind.  Sometimes the problems of everyday life have a koan-like effect: they tend to entangle the mind in the search for logical solutions which cannot be figured out.

In Zen practice , engaging with a koan involves sitting with, being with, and repeatedly asking the question as a means of inviting a profound change of heart or inner transformation.  A koan creates a kind of mental slope which inclines the mind in a different direction than it might otherwise go – off the beaten track of familiar mental patterns and towards creative discovery which lies outside the box.

In psychological terms, while there may be no way around reality, there may yet be a way through.  It’s like running up against a door that opens inward: no matter how hard you push against it, it won’t open. And yet, when you can pause and consider other options, the door may open and you can pass through.

When we can ask the right questions and tackle them with a mind which is steady, focused, and receptive, we can best discover what we need to do next.