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Susan Dix Lyons: River

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When your work involves helping others with trauma, it’s crucial to take care of your own mental health. A meditative practice helps Susan Dix Lyons with hers.

A stained-glass window stands in the small chapel where I sit before taking the elevator up to the inpatient psychiatric unit of the hospital. The image is a wilderness, a river in the middle splitting green hills, a trio of pines in the distance leading to gentle mountains beneath a yellow sky.

I sit here for a few moments each week to gather myself before entering the training site where I am a doctoral student in clinical psychology. It’s the water that holds my attention – the way light from beneath makes the radiant blue seem to ripple. It feels hopeful and alive, a sense of movement over earth.

Upstairs I will sit with people who no longer want to live. Young and old, all races and ethnicities, some with forearms slashed with their bitter histories. Stories of addiction and abuse and a loneliness so vast you can feel the draft. A forgotten blue-eyed woman. A tender boy with violent thoughts. A mother whose dimpled smile disguises the emptiness below.

The stories can wind you, unwind you. But in this space, I’ve also experienced moments of humanity greater than anything I’ve ever known. Moments when people come together around a table to share their struggles with others who nod with knowing. They will offer words of support and comfort. They will listen with a patience that suggests time is meant to be shared. They will accompany each other on walks up and down the short hallway, murmur over paper cups of instant coffee in a language of loss only they can fully know.

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The inpatient unit is one of extremes, a sacred place where darkness is sometimes pierced by kindness. A blast of light beneath that river of glass. I swear it lifts the soul.

I have become better in this space. I have gained a new understanding of what it means to have courage, to stare down life in its darkest moments and say yes, again and again.

I sit in the chapel and close my eyes before rising to begin my work as a student. “Let me learn to be the river,” I say to myself. “Let me learn from these beautiful people how we can be the river to each other.”

With a Perspective, I’m Susan Dix Lyons.

Susan Dix Lyons is a doctoral student in clinical psychology in the Bay Area.

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