Celine -
When was the last time you heard the word “sabbatical?”
I spent a LOT of time examining and researching the idea and practice of leisure in the convent. I wrote a short paper on it. The convent leadership did not allow me to offer the paper for general consumption, not because the paper was flawed but because I had no degree—which was really the last straw when it was they who said a degree was irrelevant, who actively dissuaded me from procuring one before I entered and forbade me the whole time while denouncing education in general as dangerous and useless. I think this was a case of external superiors (male hierarchy) urging high standards of credentialing and not just a convenient, inconsistent excuse by the in-house leadership, but it was still absurd when the house superior, who was utterly uncredentialed, was allowed to continue teaching and imposing whatever she liked…including lack of leisure.
What is a sabbatical? A sabbatical is leisure time. You take off the pressure of earning your keep. Your ordinary commitments are put on pause. You regroup, you rest, you reflect, you reset, and maybe you dedicate a considerable amount of time to a special project that isn’t on your ordinary agenda.
What a sabbatical is not? A sabbatical is not couch surfing, medical leave, worrying about how you are going to get your groceries next week, job hunting and watching debt pile higher while you claw together an independent adult life for the first time.
I left the convent to get time and space for self-care and proper treatment and to find clarity. I essentially asked for a sabbatical. I left the convent in too much distress to make long-term decisions. I did not yet know if I would get better and be able to return. No one asked me to make that decision, either, to their credit. I was going on medical leave and we would see how that panned out.
The way it panned out was rocky. I never slept on a couch, but it took 8 months before I had a roof I could call my own. In the meantime I had had 7 other temporary addresses, ranging from 1 week to a couple months. The move-out dates were never stable. Some places I was supposed to be there for 3 months and I was there a week, others I was supposed to be there 3 days and it quadrupled. This is an excellent way to keep one’s nervous system on edge. That was absolutely not what I had asked for.
The rules kept changing from the convent. Medical leave was a very strict arrangement, where I was supposed to pretend I was still cloistered. I could call 2 phone numbers on a flip phone: the convent, and my therapist. My hosts (who both had day jobs) had to call Ubers for me to get to therapy, and I was not allowed to go anywhere else without them chaperoning me. Basically, I could go to church and they took me out to eat a few times. I was begrudgingly permitted to go on walks around the neighborhood on my own once my legs could be more or less trusted again. I was not allowed to take the bus and go site-seeing. I was not allowed to do anything or be online even at home. Granted I did not have a lot of mental bandwidth initially. But being alone most of the week with nothing to do also was not the best way to achieve homeostasis. I wasn’t supposed to listen to “secular” music but I said to heck with that very early on. Music is therapy and always has been for me. As the weeks went by I pushed back on those and other restrictions as completely irrational impositions by people who had no idea what living in the world entailed because they had not done it for 20 years. You might ask why I complied at all and the answer is: because if I did not I would be burning bridges. It took me about 4 months to be ok with burning bridges, i.e. I knew I was not going back. Even before that point, I had to insist for permission to call my dad, whose mother had just died. The reason? It was Lent. We were not normally allowed to talk to our families during Lent. I may have privately used some very colorful words before explaining that I was perforce talking to strangers everyday when I went to church and how was that a normal cloistered Lent and where was their respect for parents that they were always preaching? I won that argument and that is how my family found out I was outside the cloister. My dad sent me an iPhone 12 Mini and that was the beginning of a whole new existence.
Once I said for sure that this was going to be more than a 3-month project, the convent required me to get a part-time job to help out with living expenses at the same time as they dialed down the financial assistance of my therapy. Since I had absolutely no resume from before entering at 18 and no professional credentials and no energy, this was going to be…challenging. Thankfully, they connected me with an office that truly cared about me, brought an attitude of amusement at the prospect of helping a “nun on the run,” and appreciated my high-quality work a few days a week. Unfortunately, it was a good hour away from my therapy location, and I was barely ready to re-learn how to drive. Necessity was necessity: the convent got me a decent used car and I commuted. I could have used quite a bit more time of sabbatical in a stable environment for once, but on the other hand I was frantic to gain independence from the endless stream of incompetence and I was not in an advantageous position to advocate for myself anyway.
The convent was one side of this equation. The world was the other. Neither impressed me. There was no system built to harbor someone like me. No rehab for someone who was not an addict, just exhausted and crushed from the cultural norm of workaholism without human sympathy, just penniless and homeless trying to find a new home. A competent, talented and uncredentialed person just trying to start over. I did not have a recognized medical disability. There was no organization dedicated to former nuns. There was no village of supportive neighbors. The Church offered nothing substantial; there is no workman’s comp for ex-cloistered nuns. The government let me have a veneer of health insurance and some tax breaks once a year because I wasn’t making enough to live on.
It was interesting to see where the help DID come from. Who stepped forward to take me in for a while, who gave me discounts or free assistance from rides to medical advice, who gifted me clothes and accessories and household items and meals. There was no real common external factor. A tiny minority of them were very wealthy, some were ok, some were barely scraping by themselves. Some liked me very much, some made no effort to get to know me. Some were religious, some were not. Some had no one else, some had all they could handle. Some were friends of the convent, some did not know what a convent even was, some were friends of new acquaintances, some were perfect strangers. Some had functional households, some dysfunctional. Most of them have not stayed in my life although they were welcome to. I am grateful to them. But all together they were scarcely a safety net, more like a haphazard knot of random fishing lines I grabbed on to as well as I could before they were reeled back in.
Was being in the world really that much better than being in the convent, you ask, if this was the way of it? Honestly, I don’t know how to measure that, and recently I’ve been inclined to say for the most part, no. That is kind of the point of this series. The first couple years were really, really rough. The crucial difference was the therapy. In therapy, I had a safe space, for the first time. It was temporary but it was recurring. There was a stability that came from knowing I had a person and place to feel safe. When I was doing phone therapy consults back at the convent I was calling out of my war zone. Now I was shutting the war zone out at least for a bit. I was practicing some guided somatic work as well, learning about grounding and breathing, starting to dance both structured and more importantly unstructured, and to do some martial art training. It astounded me how out of touch I was with my own body. A couple months after leaving the convent I attempted to get a regular Thai massage — my first massage ever — but that proved too premature: a year later I had to slowly work my way up in massage school from receiving light pressure to medium as my classmates practiced on me. The therapy that seemed to bind these other therapies all together and make them more effective was craniosacral therapy.
When I tell my story a frequent response is, “that was a really brave decision you made to leave [the convent].” Maybe it was. But I didn’t feel brave. I felt desperate. And so, so tired. I had not slept in forever, stuck in hyper-vigilance mode. I earnestly wished someone would shoot me with a tranquilizer. Finally, finally, my nervous system had found a way to deactivate. With craniosacral therapy, “stuff” started to process. Chaos became clarity. I learned amazing things about myself. I studied the therapeutic approach with my accustomed thorough enthusiasm and with a haste that startled all my instructors and mentors. Nevertheless, they let me go at my accelerated pace as I proved I could do it and between my natural talent, my own experience and observation of trauma and the studying of psychosomatic human nature I had done I possessed an edge that made clients think I had more years of therapeutic experience under my belt.
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I wish this world took sabbaticals seriously. It has largely lost the idea even of a weekend. How many people jam pack their vacations with to-do lists at the expense of downtime? I wish there was a cultural safety net for sabbaticals, for decent work hours with living wages, for recovery from trauma. I might not have survived what I went through when I left the convent. Sometimes people don’t survive shipwrecks. Too many things go wrong all at once.
I wanted a sabbatical, I thought. It was not until I had experienced craniosacral therapy that I realized downtime is only as good as you know how to make it. If your nervous system can’t turn off the alarm because you have not been trained how to or because you need the help of a therapist to facilitate the shift, the downtime is a whole new nightmare. Flip the scenario, be adept at nervous system regulation, and a sabbatical becomes fruitful and blissful, it becomes the time to process “stuff” and be creative. Once you taste it, you’ll keep seeking it.
This post is the seventh 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 5 and 6 …
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.
