Marianela Medrano

I just returned from the Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clastkine, Oregon, a community of lay and ordained people who gather to practice Zen Budhism in the Soto/Rinzai lineage, with sprinkles of Tibetan and Theravada traditions. The monastery has a Jizo Garden, a memorial garden to the dead and a shrine of vows, a place where one can leave tokens of our deepest aspirations.

I am traveling through open fields in south France, St. Etienne, Le Puy-en-Velay, Macon. My chest feels expansive, free as I slowly inch my way through a portion of El Camino de Santiago, this ancient pilgrimage route stretching across the long and curvy body of Europe, ending in Santiago de Compostela in the north-west part of Spain.

n my practice, the number of people I see on a weekly basis who are at the mercy of disorderly eating grows at an alarming rate. I hear their pain. I come from a culture where food is at the heart of who we are and how we relate to others.

Poetry has served me well. As a child I learned to seek refuge in silence, in reading and in writing, whenever I was confronted with difficulties. It turned into a habitual practice and offered me the confidence to trust that no matter how disturbing the circumstances I always had a way out or a way in, depending on the situation at hand.

Ancient wisdom tells us that there is value in embracing change and uncertainty. “The Guest House,” a poem by Persian poet Rumi, which touches on this theme, is a good reminder of that perennial wisdom, and I have used it to very good effect in my therapeutic work. Often, people come to my practice wanting to be liberated from the oppressive grip of depression. I have found Poetry Therapy to be an important tool in discerning a viable way to come out of depression.