R ESEARCH
Pilgrimage at the end of life Deborah Kelly Integrative arts psychotherapist
This article draws on Deborah Kelly’s study of her palliative care group work,
I originally trained and worked as a nurse and clinical teacher, and subsequently as a Shiatsu practitioner. I have worked in palliative care for 18 years exploring both Western and Eastern medicine. As an Integrative arts psychotherapist, group facilitator and teacher, my professional interests include working with nature, ritual, imagination and embodied exploration. Studying with Marie Angelo at Chichester University led me to explore transpersonal research methodology that could incorporate the sort of creative, imaginal and embodied explorations that were aligned to my therapeutic practice. Currently I work as a programme director, tutor, and examiner at the Institute of Arts in Therapy and Education in London. I also run a private practice and facilitate groups about death and dying, groups for elder women, and ecotherapy.
which was inspired by the Asklepian temple healing traditions of Ancient Greece. This work viewed pilgrimage as a journey towards a place of healing, a journey inwards towards self, or soul, and the pilgrimage of life towards death. The author’s study explored the therapeutic space of palliative care groups working in and with nature, using imagery, ritual, and bodywork. Five interconnected lenses, integral to creating a healing space and environment, emerged from archival material and interviews: pilgrimage, place, nature, imagination, and presence.
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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Introduction The group projects at the heart of this study were inspired by Dr Michael Kearney’s search for a new paradigm of palliative care, that would address suffering as well as pain (Kearney, 2009). Concerned that its growing medical specialisation might overshadow the original holistic focus of palliative care, he saw the potential of integrating Hippocratic medicine (from which our modern medical model developed) with the intuitive healing cultivated in temples dedicated to the god Asklepius. Asklepian temples were built in places of natural beauty, where the air was clear and where water and springs were abundant. These sanctuaries are described as places set apart from normal collective life, and as such invited a journey towards healing. Activities there, which we might recognise as contemporary holistic therapies, included bathing, rest, exercise, engagement in music and drama, the ‘practice of beauty’ and attending to the psyche through ritual, meditation and prayer. The preparation and waiting within the temples was intended to put the patients into the right frame of mind to undergo the final stage of healing,
Volume 15 Issue 2 Summer 2018
the incubation of a dream. This marked an initiation into another realm, where they would experience a ‘visitation by the gods’ (Patton, 2009:5). This inclusive, holistic approach involved a belief that the source of healing was within oneself and that healing can come through a dream, through a unity with the divine. Inspired by Kearney’s vision, I set up two projects in palliative care, incorporating Asklepian principles, which are ongoing. Participants in the palliative stage of their illness travel to a venue in a beautiful natural setting where there is time for reflection, reverie and being in nature. There they receive body therapies and can take part in meditation, simple ritual (creating a wheel of the year) and experience embodied imagination through creative visualisation, art, story and myth. Reflecting on these group experiences, there emerged the concept of a pilgrimage within the therapeutic space: a sense of ‘leaving behind’ everyday life, and of ‘going towards’ a place of rest or healing, and the potential this created for transformation before the return. The discussion that follows is adapted from my main doctoral dissertation (Kelly, 2017).
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