So last time I was about to tell you about how well homeschooling psychotherapy and human formation work, and I said most of the benefits were cognitive. I am impressed that I got any benefits at all, because my resources were one-sided. I didn’t have the modern internet. Books were severely restricted. Visits with friends and family were infrequent and only sometimes informative. Priests would drop tidbits in their well-written homilies at Mass. Eventually we listened to some carefully curated and censored podcasts, conferences and articles at meals that may have been relevant. And we had annual, sometimes bi-annual speakers address us.

There were trends in religious speakers addressing human formation. Unfortunately a lot of it also had the tone of pop psychology, it was just Catholic pop psychology and as such often went in the direct opposite direction of mainstream fads.

I do need to mention something before I go further regarding this. Last time I acknowledged that the culture at large was working to destigmatize mental illness and has met with much success. For about three times as long, it had also been working to denigrate religious practice. If you look at the statistics of how many Americans are church-involved, it seems like that has been a successful effort, too. A common complaint among my religious circles was: psychology is usurping religion and morality. This greatly complicated matters for me. The objections my superior brought up were not baseless. The whole world was trying to figure out where psychology and psychiatry fit in the grand scheme of things. And that meant this was not merely a challenging treasure hunt for a doctor. This was me judging the merits and claims of institutions that were millennia-ancient against the claims of a century-old experimental science. And the verdict would affect my entire life. No stress, right.

As I was saying, Catholic pop psychology was not quite the cut-and-dry “pray harder and suffer without complaining” that I alluded to earlier. It was entertaining, so the convent did engage these speakers sometimes. I was introduced to 12-step programs first. I learned a lot about codependency and I still learn daily. I heard different toxic behaviors described and named for the first time.

I learned to recognize some of my patterns of behavior and feeling, like my need to have things organized to the point that a walk in our beautiful forest drove me crazy because I felt like I needed to rake up all the messy leaves and pile up all the dead, strewn branches and pinecones. This was such an absurd experience, even to me, that when it happened it broke the cycle. I still love organizing stuff, but I can live with messiness, too. Organizing things gives one a sense of control when everything else feels out of control. It taught me that I felt relatively powerless.

I learned about dissociation, which explained why I bumped into things constantly and did not feel emotions the same way as other people.

I learned about stress load and anxiety. This one took the form of an informal multi-year study across the convent population revolving around breaking stuff.

Our superior was utterly horrified at the rate at which the rest of us destroyed things. She claimed no one in her family 80 years ago even as small children had ever broken anything because they simply did not dare. And yes, American throwaway consumerism promotes owner carelessness. Was that the issue with all these nuns? Well, one of the biggest offenders was not even Western, so, not so sure about that. Another nun broke everyone’s records by breaking something every day for months, and frequently they were more expensive than a coffee mug. And then she suddenly stopped breaking things. I am a fairly careful person and went a long time without breaking stuff. But even I went through a phase and I studied my feelings to help explain what was happening. I broke things when my anxiety was higher. I sensed a similar nervous state in other nuns going through accident sprees.

The superior did not help the situation with her policy, but she did help my research. In an effort to break us out of our carelessness, she decided that every time we broke something we would owe half our daily hour of free time to assigned chores. On top of that we had to publicly apologize for every broken item. If the accidents had been mere carelessness, this policy would have resolved most instances. Instead, accidents multiplied. So did scruples. What started off as “Stop breaking the plates!” turned into “I broke off three tomato flowers so now we will not have three tomatoes to eat.” If the accidents were happening because people were stressed out, deleting half their tiny bit of personal/siesta/exercise time to manual chores to “pay” for all damaged (not just destroyed) common property even though they had already surrendered literally everything they had and guilt tripping them and demanding that they publicly apologize for their lack of respect for common property each time too seems like a great way to push their anxiety to the next level and ensure more destruction. For my part, even if I enjoyed the chore, more often than not I damaged something else during the penance chore. It was an intense lesson and I wish everyone had learned it as well as I did. We are often tempted to judge the accident-prone; we would probably do better to offer a helping hand to steady them. We judge ourselves too, when really it is a signal for our benefit, alerting us that we are running-on-empty.

I do not exactly remember when the somatic part of healing became part of my awareness. In Catholic theology and the Bible, the body feels like it gets extremes. Sometimes its identity is corruption that needs to be punished and pummeled into submission, something that can’t be trusted to do the right thing and that is going to give out on the spirit eventually, so it can’t even be trusted to “just be there” like a friend. Other times it is a vessel of light, partner in glory, its worship is specifically desired by God, it is feasted in celebrations, it is good. My convent’s mission was heavily liturgical and liturgy is all about orienting the body and its senses toward spiritual worship, using posture and dance, incense and flowers, chants and sounds, food, artwork, decorations and splendid clothing, as well as the physical presence of fellow worshipers. So I guess the somatic importance was there from the beginning. Then there were the studies about the importance of infant touch for survival and hugs for emotional happiness. When I first entered the convent, my dissociation and tension were such that I did not appreciate being touched. There was practically no touching in the convent. The more I gleaned about the importance of touch, the more I wanted to try it and the more the rules tightened about it.

After ten years I applied for Solemn Profession. I was turned down for reasons that seemed utterly specious to me. There were plenty of GOOD reasons to turn me down and ask me to leave. I was, however, instead offered the opportunity to have meetings with a fellow nun who was a retired mental health professional. This was a period of crisis for me, and the meetings were the first time I was validated. The suffering I had been carrying alone for my entire life did not mean I was insane, it meant I had been through some hard stuff in life and I was coping with it.

At exactly the same time, I was validated in another way, when someone I had greatly admired since I was a child took some time to listen to my story compassionately and did not reject me in my vulnerability. The shock of that interaction, including a warm handshake, quashed my inner critic almost singlehandedly, which manifested in improved posture, plus a much sweeter and exponentially more fluent way of expressing myself. Up to that point I was continually being corrected for slouching and for being sarcastic and critical in the rare times I was not just silent, although I was oblivious on all counts. Whether I was being gaslit sometimes I still wonder, but the complaints were much fewer while I spoke much more often. Oddly enough, that same person was the only person in my entire life at the convent to ever suggest I possibly did not have a vocation. I did not want to believe it.

A year after all that, I did have the solemn profession ceremony. I was not actually in a position to make that decision with true freedom, too much from my past was still unaddressed and too much human formation was still underdeveloped. The five years following that ceremony were a series of heartbreaking events that shattered my sense of stability in the convent and bereaved me of dear ones. The convent had tentatively shifted to acceptance of mental illness and therapy, but was very selective of practitioners. I tried two more professionals by phone consult, but the lack of somatic therapy curtailed any progress. I felt like I was in an echo chamber explaining everything that was dysfunctional and all the professionals could say was “you’re right.” Not exactly helpful.

Covid did not hit us the same way it hit the world. Being cloistered, we were already on a stay at home order and had built a semi-independent world on our mountaintop ranch to support that. The toilet paper crisis was super annoying, and so was people being forbidden to attend our church services. Other than that, we all escaped without catching covid or shifting lifestyle much. We heard what was happening though, and I took it very hard. Yet more instability, more betrayal, more stress.

The following year, I collapsed. Temporary intermittent paralysis. I just could not take any more. I wasn’t sick. My tests were normal. I was sick of being ignored, overworked, lied to, uncared for in the ways that were missing. I wanted to be treated like a human being and feel like a human being. I was very confused about what was happening and after a few months the symptoms disappeared for nine months. Then the symptoms came back with a vengeance. I demanded a leave of absence to get help, and since I was now solemnly professed and not in formation anymore, the convent had a canonical responsibility to facilitate it. My homeschooling in an inhospitable environment had done what it could and it wasn’t enough.

Thankfully, I was about to find some more of the help I needed.

This post is the sixth of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

Previous Letters: 1 2 3 4 and 5…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.

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I was denied mental health therapy for a long time because my superior supposed that mental illness was just another name for lack of faith in God.

Over the last couple decades, while I was isolated in a cloister, the American culture has worked hard to remove stigma around mental illness, normalizing psychiatric interventions and therapeutic counseling. When I left the convent a few years ago, I discovered there was enough encouragement to the cognitive and pharmaceutical therapies going on, but the acceptance of the somatic angle seemed underserved and experimental. That is one of the reasons I headed into psychosomatic craniosacral therapy. It was not an easy journey. How did I get from a troubled teenager who could not bear to be touched to a psychosomatic therapist whose soothing presence and accurate intuition is regularly remarked on by clients?

Much of the cognitive portion of this journey unfolded in the convent. I remember as an adolescent I was interested in psychology, there just was not much I had access to beyond pop psychology along the lines of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I did not know anyone who had had a successful experience with counseling. In the convent I was expecting more literacy in the subject, especially because the Catholic Church was starting to impose more psychiatric health evaluations into religious life and calling for more human formation due to both the pedophilia scandals and the extremely high attrition rates of final professed religious [N.B. final professed religious have essentially committed the rest of their lives to the religious life, so their departure is roughly the equivalent of divorce or annulment depending on the situation]. As a teen aspirant applying to join this convent, the reality I found was a few brief and superficial preliminary conversations with nuns and priests who were predisposed to accept their first young and pliable vocations to a brand new foundation, as soon as possible, i.e., please skip college. And voilà, I was accepted to the formation program.

Once I had settled in to my new home, there was a mandatory psychiatric evaluation—my administering doctor’s day job was actually evaluating potential death row prisoners. It included a very, very long scantron that asked me in multiple different ways whether I liked to torture animals and exactly how much. I felt pretty darn insane by the end of it. Some seminarian friends who had to take it earlier had forewarned me and said for the written word association section I should just answer “coffee” to all twenty questions. I may have put coffee down for a couple instances but my insanity and addiction do NOT lie in the realm of beanwater like theirs does. In case you were wondering, a few years later those seminarians reluctantly moved on and to the best of my knowledge have started lovely families.

Anyway, the evals were treated as a joke around me, and yet I was not allowed to read the results of my own eval. This was something I never forgave. I was assured that most religious superiors at the time did not share the results with their subjects. One of the reasons my superiors gave was that no one (with one hilarious exception) ever “passed” it but there they were, still in religious life. To be fair, evaluating sanity is not exactly the same as discerning suitability for religious life and, as I mentioned, the testing hardly seemed calibrated to this specialized situation. Sanity is, however, a prerequisite for religious life. Traditional Catholic religious life is a demanding lifestyle that takes away most of the crutches needed to live with an illness of almost any kind. I am sure some people think you have to be crazy in order to join a convent. I admit it is not for everyone: if crazy is just slang for “not normal” then yes, you have to be crazy to join a convent. But you can’t be insane. You can’t be unwell. Kind of like you have to be in extraordinarily good shape and sort of crazy to join the Navy Seals.

Religious life was new to me. Autonomy was something I had never tasted, coming straight from minority at home to what was essentially minority in a convent. When I pushed back against strange decisions like the withheld evaluation results and got ‘no’ for an answer again, I was used to bending to authority until my understanding of the rationale clarified. I gave authority the benefit of the doubt. As the years went by, the doubts got stronger. I had plenty of proof no one in the convent was equipped to help me with my struggles, and so I asked if I could try psychotherapy as a last resort. My superior said no. She literally said she did not want a therapist/doctor competing with her authority. If I wanted psychotherapy, I had to leave the convent, and I probably wouldn’t come back because no psychotherapist would understand the cloistered convent lifestyle and they would influence me out of my vocation. And anyway mental illness probably wasn’t real, it was surely a faith crisis. Pray harder. Be nice to people. You’ll be fine.

Seems like the right decision was to pack my bags and check out, wasn’t it?

Except that was not possible.

I was a kid with no social safety net, no financial backup. 2008 had slammed everyone, including my family. Minimal medical insurance did not cover psychotherapy, and private pay was expensive. And my superior did have a point: even if I could pay for it, what guarantee was there I would find a genuinely helpful therapist? Not everyone has the same expertise… and how many would support my vocation, which was the most important thing to me at the time? I had no idea what to even look for. I had never seen a successful psychotherapeutic outcome. If I left the convent, I would have had to build my life from scratch (and I honestly had no idea what that meant, either, only that it was going to be “super stressful,” as I would have said back then) and who knew how long it would be before I actually achieved a helpful therapist.

If I was going to get this healthcare, I was hoping the convent would ask around for a suitable referral, and possibly get donations to help cover it. Was that fair? Well, not any less fair than accepting me to the community without due diligence. But it did not matter. The answer was no. The convent would not help be resourceful. Was I trapped? Yes. But there is always a window. A crack. I decided to homeschool myself in human formation. I decided to stop waiting for permission to weigh for myself whether theology or psychology held the answers. And I would see what time brought.

Speaking of time, I have to go. More on the results of autodidactic therapy next time.

This post is the fifth of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

Previous Letters: 1 2 3 and 4…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.

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Must be because I am sitting on a patio glider that I’m reminded of this: it wasn’t until I joined the convent that I discovered wind in trees can sound like ocean waves. I believe they were cottonless cottonwoods. They grow very tall very fast and very shady without the cottony mess and were planted at the convent around the time I was. Sometimes when the summer weather was clement I would sit on a patio and rock on some plastic patio chairs (bad for the chair, perhaps, but I was desperate for a rocking chair) and listen to the wind. I am an ocean girl but I had to admit that sound was much gentler than the California crashing waves, which were all I knew at the time. My nervous system was too overwhelmed to appreciate the crashing noise at the beach by the time I entered the convent. Since it was a landlocked, cloistered convent I was practically guaranteed to never see or hear the ocean again. That made the wind’s gentle mimicry all the more enchanting.

I heard they recently moved the big shed where that patio was, I guess using a crane, so they can continue their expansion project. That reminds me of some crazy times. We were living in modular trailers and needed to move them to make space for the first new wing, but there was not space to drag them. So we hired a crane to shift them. We cut the power the day before the crane was scheduled. And then it got windy. Much too windy to risk swinging giant trailers through the air on a crane. If I remember correctly, it was almost a month before the weather and the crane operators could both agree on a day to finish the job. In the meantime, we couldn’t hook the power back up, so our trailers had no hot water or heating or lights and occasionally the weather was not just windy it was downright frosty on our mountaintop. The adjacent ranch house with all our common use areas had a tiny kitchen and a shower that still had hot water…that left 20 women who were claiming 7 minute shower slots or going without for quite a while. I think we mostly took it in good humor. Most of us were from suburban middle-class America and used to daily hot showers, but several were from other countries where sponge baths were normal or bathing was not always so available. Some cared more and some cared less. Some took it gleefully as a challenge. Eventually we were rewarded for our patience; the new wing had plenty of nice hot showers.

When you are in a group that has an assortment of perspectives and expectation sets and you meet a challenge like this together, it broadens your perspective and loosens up your expectations. Our rigid expectations on how things must be often end up being pre-meditated resentments. It makes us ask “why?” It proves different people may need different things from what you need. It proves some needs are manufactured and some are natural. Taking a key concept from the Rule of St Augustine I mentioned last time, examining these situations sometimes reveals that even a manufactured need, i.e. one that was caused purely by standards of upbringing, cannot always be unmanufactured and therefore has to be respected.

I know this is a funny story and possibly a horrifying one. For me it was on the edge between funny and too much. I am sensitive to cold and cold showers are worse than no shower at all. Plus it wasn’t just the showers this one time, the whole place was cold most of the year. On the one hand, it was genuinely fun and exciting to watch this monastery be constructed from nothing and to be a part of the building process, which is always messy and inconvenient. It engaged me in a different way than I had been engaged in childhood, which was almost exclusively academic and home keeping. It was fun to have companions to gripe with about the sub-middle-class hardships during the concerted effort to construct a more convenient and healthy convent home. But it was also at this growth spurt that many of us started to realize we were being overworked. There were lots of excuses about needing to push through the growth spurt, saving money, time constraints. Actually the problem was superiors who did not value recreation and life-work balance, superiors who lived a completely different life than the rest of us because they were constantly putting out fires and making more fires to put out instead of following the daily schedule they had set along with us. If they had followed the schedule they might have believed us when we told them how we felt instead of calling us lazy and saying they were doing more work than we were precisely so we could “enjoy ourselves” in the choir and get some sleep at night. They congratulated themselves that they did not need the consolation of our company to survive and feel good about themselves, all they needed to do was work. Work all the time. At first I resented their “I don’t need you” attitude, because in a normal monastic setting the elder, more advanced, more wise members would be at recreation at least to grace the younger ones with their good example and wisdom, and perhaps once in a while to have their wisdom expanded from the unique backgrounds the new members brought to the table. Later I gave up and, if anything, I encouraged them not to come to recreation because their presence robbed the recreation of joy and their influence drained the younger ones of a balanced outlook. Deprivation can become a game or an ego trip or a guilt trip especially for the neophytes who don’t know the wisdom about pacing themselves. Unfortunately, as I said before, we were all neophytes from top to bottom. The one in charge of everyone had the highest physical pain tolerance and also some of the toughest emotional avoidance mechanisms.

A large majority of the people who end up on my massage table, whether for massage or for craniosacral therapy, are overworking themselves. Most of the time they know it or are starting to know it. Not always. Sometimes I have to tell them it is not necessary to push themselves so hard at the gym 6 days a week just to feel like they are worth the air they breathe. Chasing success, chasing adrenaline rushes, chasing codependency. Their psychosomatic alarms are going off. It is the same pattern I saw in the convent. There is always an excuse, always a fire to put out, even if it isn’t their fire, and they end up subconsciously creating extra fires to put out. Also they suck other people into their turbine of frantic alarm and frenetic activity. Maybe their career achieves lift off like an airplane by profiting off of other people and spitting out their chopped up nervous systems. Or, maybe they are the one who has been chopped up and left for dead. I am here to tell them, and you, that there are other and better ways to do life, success, and happiness.

I know this letter looks like I ramble, and I guess I do. When I used to handwrite my letters—you know, those half-page-max letters in the convent, I could count up to 12 different styles of handwriting reflecting what I was feeling during each sentence or clause. Writing takes me a long time and a wide arc of emotions. There is no handwriting here, but I mentioned I was on the patio. The first sort of contemplative nostalgic section was in the morning cool before the sun had reached over the fence. The sun started warming up and I went into a more warmly active storytelling (also I am watching a lizard pop out of all corners of the garden). Now it is actually hot and too bright to be on the computer outside and I am starting to think about heading to work and so I start thinking about why I work and how it is connected to my past. For too long I think our culture has forgotten how much environment subtly affects us both in mind and body. We are starting to wake up to it again. Have you noticed anything like that in your life today? Is there some environmental change that would make a difference to your outlook, feelings, thoughts, energy? Anyway, I’m not ashamed to ramble. It’s like an organic, ambling stroll through the wilderness and not a march through a French garden.

This post is the fourth of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

Previous Letters: 1 2 3

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.

Leave a comment

Get more from Essie Bourke in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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I have been writing all morning and will see how far I can get with this letter before I shower and get on with my work day. I should probably eat something besides a chocolate protein bar, too.

Last time I said we had the map to a well-rounded holy human life in the convent. Of course all that information was also available outside the convent. When I said I entered the convent to find answers, I was expecting the information to be curated for me, not implying the texts were locked up in secret vaults. I expected it to be like joining a college course, not a secret society. I expected the professors to be living their research in the laboratory of the cloister. In a sense they were. Because the community was built from scratch and not transplanted from an experienced successful community, all of us ended up being guinea pigs. And yes, that is true for all humanity throughout time. The idea of evolution is precisely nature exploring what works and what doesn’t throughout all the variables of a shifting environment. It never reaches stasis and perfection because no sooner does the species tweak itself enough to cope with a variable than that very tweak tweaks the environment and sets a whole new cascade of consequences into action. Multiply this across every species and the mere numbers make your brain shut down. I sort of digress but this is why I have learned to be slow to judge and reluctant to scream about the existence of evil especially as some sort of proof for the non-existence of divinity. I think reality is about development toward survival and the freedom to develop. People are allowed to change, allowed to experiment. Destruction catches up with those who do not figure out the game. You can refuse to change, or you can change too much. Both will be your demise. The map, the instruction manual to the game is partly in words of wisdom, and partly in flesh. What was more lacking in my experience at the convent (and frankly most of my social encounters up to then) was the fleshly part.

Words have to be interpreted. They tend toward abstraction. They are imprecise. We had the Rule of St. Augustine of Hippo to read every day. I just read the full text again, it has been at least two years since I did that, and some of it I find shocking even though I had it memorized before. It is more of a political constitution while it reads like ancient life coaching. If I had not studied it so much I would reject it now as so far out of touch with modern life and sensibilities (it was written about sixteen centuries ago). The essential elements of it, and what I admired so much about it, were the Servant-Leader, the non-judgmental recognition and service of individual bodily needs as opposed to some artificial standard of equality or asceticism or unbridled indulgence, mutual trust, readiness to forgive and realistic acceptance of everyone’s status as a work-in-progress, the mandate to constructive criticism and a sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, and the focus on the interior effects of all practices rather than outward appearances. It is a political constitution for a people sharing the purpose of seeking God, its vehicle is a community of friendship based in love and respect for all, empowering each member to be responsible and mature spiritually, physically, emotionally, intellectually, even financially. While it prescribes common property, it is not a dictatorship, socialism or communism, because the members of the community are all members of the governing body and have some voting rights in the manner of distribution.

The words of his Rule must be read in the context of St. Augustine’s life. His autobiography, the Confessions has successfully crossed all cultural boundaries and had deep impacts on multitudes, but contains more of the story of his life before he became a religious founder. The desire to have a community of friends seeking true wisdom is there but not yet realized. His later works, letters and the biography by his friend Possidius tell more about the vibrant and warm humanity behind the Rule.

The problem with examples and heroes is that we often try to emulate them exactly, not accounting for all the variables and evolutions of our situation compared to theirs. Monkey see, monkey do. This is literally disastrous. In the 1960’s many religious communities were pushed to change too much, too fast. Most of them are now extinct species. Communities like my convent started springing up around the 90’s trying to replicate the Golden Days of before 1960, the full numbers of the 1950’s sometimes coupled with the asceticism of the 16th century mystic religious reformers. They seemed to overlook that the 1960’s turmoil happened because the 1950’s status quo was untenable, abusive and stagnant. They failed to realize that the situation of the human race had changed more in the last century with the advent of technology than it had for the last couple millennia combined. The regulations had to be completely overhauled, the spirit of the law had to be divined in order to give it new expression. The monkey could not just imitate, it had to grasp the essentials.

This post is the third of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

Previous Letters: 1 2

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.

The irony of it.

Obviously as I mentioned last time, I had absorbed loads of disillusionment by the time I reached 18 and had to make some decisions about my future. Even walking into the convent I believed I was doing it with eyes wide open, no illusions that the people inside were anything but people, not angels, not even canonized saints yet. I was, however, expecting more maturity and emotional intelligence than the average. The convent was only a few years old and a dozen members strong when I joined with two other teenagers even younger than me. I was not expecting perfection, and I did not get perfection. Only many years later, gradually, did I realize that my standard of reference was conditioned to be extremely low.

The community overall was several points of improvement on a superficial level to the emotional intelligence quotient I had known outside. For instance, I never observed shouting matches and catfights. I never observed racism among the multi-national sisterhood. We tried to respect our elders, open the door for each other, and be careful how we phrased critiques and complaints. We had a regular time to apologize. But we were being forced to merely tolerate our bodies and other people in the search for mysticism and a deep relationship with God. We were not allowed to have personal friendships with each other. Physical contact like a celebratory hug was forbidden except on 3-4 major stages in a 12 year formation journey. We were not even allowed to say goodbye if anyone discerned out of the community: they were forbidden to disclose their departure so as to avoid tears and drama. There was no mindfulness of our bodies, on the contrary we were supposed to forget them and master them as we drove them with reduced, broken sleep, daily manual labor, frequent fasting and abstinence, and long hours in chapel with perfect posture. It is all fun and games when you are young and athletic.

If all this dissociation from body and neighbor really did result in transforming mystical union with God, it would probably be worth it. But there was no evidence that was happening. If anything, we were daily criticized for not achieving more on the mystical plane, because the fate of the world and all the souls in it depended somehow on our personal success. Leaving was failure.

The key was actually in the Rule we read out loud as a community literally everyday, and in the life of the person who penned it, St. Augustine of Hippo. As I studied it and him the irony of my situation became more and more cruel. We had everything we needed in theory, on paper, to be mature, warm and holy humans. But the leadership feared that mature and warm humanity because it is difficult to control and exploit, and because it requires facing the frighteningly painful hurts and disillusionments of the past and present in order to move forward and grow. And since this was a new community trying to build from scratch, it had an element of survival mode constantly on. We needed to support ourselves, protect ourselves, and we had limited avenues available. Deep work takes time and energy and it does not usually happen in the fight for bare survival.

Yet without digging that foundation, the heights of holiness cannot be erected. Dictatorships flourish in times of high stress, when not even the leader has space to breathe let alone the energy to discuss with mature collaborators. Easier to cultivate dependents who simply follow orders quickly, who believe their self-sacrifice is for some great cause.

That is what I mean about green grass and fences. I can’t tell you how many married women looked at us through our fences and lattice work grilles and said when their families were (hopefully) out of earshot, “I wish sometimes I could run away and be a nun!” And there I was on the other side of the fence, realizing the grass was no greener there. Both sides had the potential to be green, and neither was achieving it.

I said a lot about mindfulness and dissociation from the body. Even learning those words took me more than a decade. Then came the challenge of actually doing it. Thanks to the dearth of warm supportive relationships, there was no safe container within which to go through that process of returning to myself, no real life exemplar of the type of relationship, the attitude of affirmation and understanding and loving regard I should normally have for my body, heart and mind. Some people hovered on the edge; everyone drew the line too early. I left the convent equipped with the template and in search of a collaborator. It wasn’t the fence that was the problem, it was the gatekeepers.

This post is the second of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.

In the monastery we were required to write our communications -by hand- whenever possible during the work day so as to preserve the monastic ambience. At night we were not supposed to communicate at all. We were supposed to be wrapped in contemplation until our weak human bodies were wrapped in sheets and blankets, succumbed to regrettable physical realities for a couple hours between Compline and Midnight Matins, and between Midnight Matins and optional breakfast. All this to say that all our notes had to start with “Dear” whether that was your style or not. I worked in the convent email correspondence assignment for a decade and a similar rule prevailed. You know how sometimes you are emailing and it turns into a text message length conversation? Well, imagine if every time you sent a text message you had to start it off with “Dear Essie,” even if all you wanted to say was, “Thank you, we will see you then” and you had exchanged 6 texts in the last 3 minutes. It was on purpose, counteracting the “McDonald’s mentality” of instant sloppy gratification which has swamped American culture. Essentially: You did it badly, but at least you did it fast. You kicked the can a couple feet down the road instead of depositing it in the recycle bin, because it is faster. While trying to preserve doing things well, the monastic formality could go overboard and be inflexible, obstinately boxing every form of textual communication in the formality of a postal letter instead of recognizing the conversational hybridization that is text messaging. Besides formality, recent tech communication has even led to a disregard for time, at least in my personal 3 years of experience now compared to everyone else’s 20. A text message conversation is a conversation that can be picked up and put down at any time. Depending on how you left it, you might not even acknowledge that it has been a week. Or you might dump a truck full of emoji hugs like you’ve been gone a year. Compare that to my past. Monastic life dynamically marks time, it is shaped by time, by the hours of the day, the hours of prayer, the cycle of the week, the calendar of feast days and fasting days. Oddly enough that seems also to dim the perception of time, because the years start to look very much one like another and your memory has fewer unique external circumstances to reference and distinguish compared to the superabundance of recurring patterns.

This letter is already too long based on the standard allowance the convent gave for friends and family. I see I have fallen into my old vocabulary patterns again. I hope your eyes didn’t glaze over this time. The writing rules were not as strict when I first entered the monastery. No, we were never allowed to use email for personal letters, only for convent business. Partly that was to reduce the amount of distraction and frankly angst that would come through the mail. Technically the superiors claimed the right to read all incoming and outgoing personal letters, and dictated what topics were acceptable and which were not for our outgoing missives. In practice the superiors were unwilling to actually read the whole considerable volume of mail, but we did have to submit our letters unsealed and unstamped and sometimes there were censored items. This is an ancient practice which in modern times feels oppressive and cultish and a violation of privacy…at least that’s what people say while governments coerce social media platforms to censor content and creators, big advertising stalks your eye movements and clicks online, and secret services surveil your movements and relationships through your phone location history.

I knew the world was like this when I left it to join a cloister at eighteen. I was hoping a monastery would have figured out the right balance. After living almost half my life behind its miles of fences in a California mountaintop, I understood. We have been culturally conditioned to the point of blindness, and not only blindness but too often inertia, to the abuse of power. A monastic cloister is built to be the epitome of social justice, maturity, peace and harmony with self, the community and the transcendent. If even that enclave can fall prey to the human problems, why would you think you are free of them out here?

P.S. My penmanship greatly improved after 10 years of being harassed about its illegibility, so I guess the convent wasn’t a total loss!

P.P.S Ok, I will tell you how to get green grass next time. But U hav 2 rite bak 2 m3 furst.

This post is the first of the Dear Celine Series on Grasp The Essentials— letters to an imaginary friend about what 16 years inside a cloistered monastery taught me about the world outside, and why neither one has quite figured out how to treat people like people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Essie Bourke is a certified massage therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy (Upledger Institute) in Orange County, CA. She is the owner of Chaos To Clarity, LLC, a private manual therapy business. She spent her early adulthood as a cloistered nun before leaving and rebuilding her life from scratch. She now works with the nervous system professionally and writes about what she notices — inside institutions, inside bodies, and inside a culture that keeps wondering why everyone is so exhausted.