Turiya Hanover

can we die with open hands?

In this episode of the Received Wisdom series, I'm going to talk about Turiya Hanover.

Turiya and Rafia, whom I spoke about in the last episode, have worked together for many years as group leaders. But of course, each of them is also an accomplished teacher and therapist in their own right. Turiya is a remarkable therapist. She shows a deep understanding of human emotion and what it is to live as a human being.

I'll mention a couple of teachings, which I associate particularly with Turiya. One is, trust your body. She says this over and over again during experiential group work. Trust your body. What does she mean by this? She means trust the sensations in your body. Don't just think about things, mentally, intellectually. That won't get us very far. We need to really sense what's going on in the body. That's where emotional blockages are stored. By getting in touch with the bodily sensations, we can really work on past traumas much more effectively than by merely taking an intellectual approach. Trust your body.

Of course, those physical sensations can take many forms, and they might pop up anywhere in the body. So when Turiya is working with someone, she keeps asking, what are you feeling in your body? What are you sensing right now? Without anything being right or wrong, without a particular part of the body being mentioned. It's up to the individual to feel inside themselves, each of us to sense what's actually going on inside the body. Where is there pain? Where is there a knotted feeling or a numbness, or feeling of warmth and expansion? These are indicators, they are clues to something happening in the body. And usually indicators of emotions or emotional energy that has either got stuck in us in the past, or is arising in the present moment. And that's the amazing thing about the bodily sensations.

As another friend put it, the body never lies. And it's always actually in the present moment. Perhaps the sensations are arising now in this present moment as a result of past trauma. But it's right now that we sense what's going on in the body. So this method of feeling into one's own body also brings us into the present moment.

So trust your body is one of Turiya's teachings, which I love. But there's another one I want to talk about. And that's also something she's said more than once, and it's this, can we die with our hands open? And I like this question. It's challenging, isn't it? What does it mean to have our hands open? It means to be open, to be receptive.

It's so easy to close. It's so easy to just shut down, isolate oneself from what's going on around one. You know, life can be painful. There are challenges. And there's a part of us that always tends to close our hands, to become closed. And so this is Turiya's big challenge to us, really. Can we live openly? It doesn't matter how many times our heart has been broken, can we come back to life with open hands, receptive? Because also in that receptivity is when we are giving. It's a two way thing. And if we are closed, not only are we not receiving, but also not giving to others, not in any meaningful sense.

So to really live life, we have to meet this challenge, to be open. Can we live life with our hands open? And only if we live that way will we come to death with a chance of having our hands open.

And this question also reminds us that we are going to die one day. And in that moment, in that moment, for every single one of us, there will be a sort of question arising in us: have I really lived? And that's another way of putting Turiya's challenge to us. Can we die with our hands open? Another way of saying it is, have we really lived?

And this is a beautiful question which we should each of us really ask ourselves every day. Am I really living? Are my hands open to life?

So thank you Turiya for these and many other teachings, and your beautiful example of how to work with people, one-to-one and in group situations.