Collaborative Relationship: Honoring The Ineffable

This blog is devoted to creating a dialogue between health care practitioners, teachers, clients, and students that celebrates collaborative relating.

“My life learning is that authentic relating is the foundation for inspired collaboration. Such openheartedness becomes the cornerstone upon which relationships grow—between therapist and client, teacher and student, husband and wife, parents and children, and between individuals in organizations.”
__ Matthew Cohen

It’s with this as a backdrop that I launch this blog. I wish to offer my own and invite others to contribute their descriptions of key moments in their work and life that proved to be profound turning points. These are occasions when people come together for self-reflection with honesty, humility, and awareness, and life-illuminating interactions occur.

Honoring the ineffable with words is no easy endeavor. Only with great sensitivity and care can we attempt to describe what seems too awesome or sacred to be spoken. Yet, our most gifted poets do it all the time, inspiring and teaching us with their devotion to their craft. With their words, we read or hear and feel profoundly connected with that which becomes a portal into life’s fundamental truths.

We, also, can find our poetic and narrative voice and give expression to our experience of the awesome and sacred moments we share with our clients and students.

The reward for doing this well is having a collection of inspiring and informative stories that add to our body of knowledge about how to give the collaborative relationship the prominence it deserves. As a collection of stories, poems, and the like grows on this blog, I see an anthology emerging that vividly documents the crucial role that inspired collaboration plays in therapy, education, and between any two people who are deeply relating. This could become a book for the benefit of all, including therapists, life coaches, teachers, clients, and students alike.

So here is my first contribution, a “Turning Point Story” with Ava and George, and myself in a couple’s therapy session. It ends with a Commentary by Ava.