At the Edge of Ireland (22 page)

My first meeting—accidental, coincidental, and possibly inevitable—was with Dr. Michael Murphy. I didn't expect such a great bear of a man. Not at all. The way people on Beara spoke of Michael, in subdued terms of respect, humility, and deep affection in most cases, led me to picture him as one of those cuddly, warm, and fuzzy therapist types, always ready with a few encouraging aphorisms to stimulate the release of underused human potentials. And there's definitely that side to Michael. His voice is gentle with a pleasurable reassuring “bedside manner” burr to it, and a pin-drop vérité ambience. The accent, reflecting his Anglo-Irish/American heritage, is I suppose some kind of mellow mid-Atlantic mélange. Certainly, despite his long Irish ancestry, I rarely noticed anything of the local Beara brogue. His humor is generous and gleeful—he smiles and laughs easily, openly, and as far as any learned, ever-analyzing psychotherapist can be, he seems very much at peace with himself. His large and all-enveloping self.

Before I met him, a friend showed me something Michael had written about the importance of Beara and his great love for the land and its people:

I wrote these lines recently and all those who love Ireland and the Beara in particular will know exactly what I mean:

Ireland

Is the place that I have lived in

And the place that has lived in me

I rediscovered my Celtic roots on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland a handful of miles from where my father was born in 1888. Beara is a spectacular speck on our planet where the wild masculine spirit of nature is so much in evidence and the earthy feminine soulful welcome of the place is so Irish. I've lived on and off here in recent years and have found the life-enhancing balance of the Soul and the Spirit of nature is nowhere more palatable and breathtaking. Ireland and the Irish people are magnets that draw others from many parts of the world where Soul and Spirit may seem to be in shorter supply. Here on Beara there is softness and wetness in the bogs between the rocks and the sea invites us to dive deep, for the depths of the sea and the depths of the Soul contain the essence of love. The Soul of nature here beckons us to join her. The Spirit of the place is often wildly exuberant, with frequent gale-force winds churning up the sea; many fishermen from the towns here have been lost in storms at sea. Sometimes the clouds seem alive as they dash across the sky and sometimes they breeze gently by like a blessing…It is so easy to gaze at all this natural beauty, and in those moments when I am open, I feel the Soul and Spirit of nature gazing back at me.

I relished Michael's receptivity to the power and essence of Beara and was rapidly learning to share his love—his transcendental empathy—for this remarkable corner of Ireland. Many sense personal possibilities in its power—possibilities for reinvented lives, for solace and protection from mind-wrecking burdens, for releasing the huge healing potentials of love and forgiveness and for learning to live on after traumas and losses. Such possibilities attract both seekers and healers, and Beara has an abundance of both.

Michael picked a segment from Oscar Wildes's
De Profundis
to describe the needs of many “pilgrims” to Beara:

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none so to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and the secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night and stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt; she will cleanse me in great waters and with bitter herbs make me whole.

(Later on I discovered how literal the “bitter herbs” are to many of the lotions and potions created here by Beara's healers and holistic counselors.)

Michael's life and career seem to have many elements right out of
A Course in Miracles
. The accolades for his own book,
The Wisdom of Dying: Practices for Living
, and his famous workshops on love, loss and forgiveness, from such prominent individuals as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Thomas Moore (
Care of the Soul
), James Hill-man, Paulo Coelho, and many others, are mightily impressive. Michael is particularly proud of Matthew Fox's foreword to his latest book in progress,
Secrets of Love, Loss and Forgiveness—A Drug-Free Prescription for the Loving Life
:

I welcome this book, this bard, this storyteller, this healer who speaks not just his own thoughts, but the stories of so many he witnessed in his workshops
…[The book]
holds many treasures and while they parallel the teachings of many of our greatest mystics ranging from Lao Tzu and Buddha to Meister Eckhart and Jesus, they emerge from a Celtic soul that is very Twenty-first Century, very busy waking people up who have quite fallen asleep. And for that reason it is applicable to all of us.

A number of our newfound friends on Beara had participated in Michael's week-long workshops. Without exception they spoke of him in the warmest of terms and insisted that Anne and I meet him. “He's a very gentle soul,” one woman told us, “but his workshops are not for the faint of heart. It's a grueling, cleansing process—he warned us about embracing dark shadows and gale-force winds of change, and he was dead right. Fortunately he's got a laughing Irish soul and a wonderful smile too, so it helped us through the rough passages—those revelations you hadn't expected or wanted. But at the end of it all after it's shaken your bones and transformed all your dreams—you get a new lease on life and, most important, on love.”

Dr. Michael Murphy
by Celia Teichman

So finally we met—at an idyllic cottage Michael rents at the western edge of Castletownbere. It sits coyly on a rise above fields that slope down to the black ragged surf-whipped rocks along Bere Island Channel. And as Anne and I were admiring the vistas, the door opened and out stepped this tall, burly, platinum-haired man with a grin that wrapped around his face and a chuckle that, as Anne said later, “has real sunshine in it!”

Conversation flowed on crests of easy conviviality. Despite an amazingly wattled and grooved career as a general practitioner in London, a psychotherapist in Boston, and cofounder of one of the first hospices in the USA at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany, New York, there was no complacency in Michael's manner. Rather he exuded an almost boyish enthusiasm for his work, his books, and his hundreds of workshops given around the world in the USA, Belgium, Holland, Germany, France, Canada, Romania, and Ireland. And that smile of his filled the room, even when he left it to make us a cup of tea.

 

U
NFORTUNATELY WE WERE NEVER
able to attend one of his workshops on Beara, but our friendship with Michael grew as we began to understand more and more about the spiritual depths of his philosophy.

“It's really quite simple—if sad,” he once told us over dinner at our cottage looking across that beautiful white sand beach at Allihies. We were sitting outside on the patio, the sun was sinking over the Skelligs, and that gorgeous evening light that we so loved bathed the whole landscape once again in a sheen of platinum-gold.

“At the workshop I tell a rather long tale of the Celtic Trinity, which in essence says that today we are much too overconcerned with our mortal ‘shell.' All our efforts to reinforce it from the dangers and insecurities of life through the accumulation of ‘things' and possessions and ego boosters eventually end up with us losing touch with Soul and Spirit. They begin to atrophy and fester in chaos. However, the link can be reestablished by a bridge—we call it the bridge of forgiveness and love. But in order to cross this delicate bridge, you must surrender up all those burdens and trauma stories of your life—betrayals, abuse, loneliness, loss, and rage—and cross as lightly as possible to reestablish the Trinity of mortal Self, Soul, and Spirit that is your true state in life—and in death.”

“And that's it?” I asked, surprised by the apparent simplicity of the process.

“Yep—that's it.” Michael laughed. “Sounds simple, but believe me, it can take a lifetime to get it right!”

“Just what you'd expect a psychiatrist would say!”

“Yes—and unfortunately, many do. And they make sure it does!”

 

O
NE OF THE MOST
moving miniadventures with Michael occurred when, on a beautiful evening, he asked me if I'd like to see where he takes his workshop participants to “throw off their burdens.”

We drove to the western tip of Beara to a small harbor at Garnish, a little to the north of Dursey Island and the cable car across its churning sound. The sun was just beginning its long slow descent over the Skelligs as we climbed up steep moorland slopes and across the rock-pocked plateaus of spiky marsh grass and peat bogs. Finally, through a narrow defile in the strata we suddenly emerged on the edge of jagged cliffs with a sixty-foot drop into the churning surf below. Gulls hung above us, floating on the vigorous updrafts, the seaweedy smell of the ocean filled our nostrils, and the sea spray fell like delicate dew on our heads.

“Now what?” I said, a little puffed by the climb.

“Well—I can explain what we do…or you can do it.”

“S'long as it doesn't involve me leaping off these cliffs, I'll do it!”

“Okay,” said Michael, laughing. “Try to imagine one of the most burdensome memories or losses or hurts you carry around somewhere inside…”

“I'm not sure I…”

“Just try. There's no rush…Remember—if you want to live deeply, live slowly…”

So I tried, but nothing seemed to be clamoring for attention. I was reluctant to say this to Michael but…and then, wham! A memory so vivid and painful rammed itself up from somewhere deep down in that forgotten zone way below everyday consciousness. It came with such force that it actually felt like a physical blow inside my head—and my heart.

“Ah…I saw you get that one!” said Michael quietly. “That's a biggie.”

I didn't know what to say. The memory of the incident was now so tangible that I felt almost disconnected from time and space.

Michael seemed to understand exactly what was happening. “Okay—take it easy, and when you're ready, just go look around for a rock—something about the size and weight of that trauma that's in your head and then bring it back to the edge of the cliff here.”

So I walked off slowly among the peat bogs until I saw one particular rock—a nasty, jagged, broken shard about three feet long and extremely malicious-looking. I lifted it. It was very heavy and seemed reluctant to be pried out of its mud hole. But eventually with a wet sigh and vigorous peaty squirts, I managed to ease it up and carry it back to where Michael stood at the cliff edge.

“Wow! That's a beauty!” He chuckled.

“Yeah. And it's damned heavy. What's next?”

“Well, very simple. You're now going to toss the stone away down into the surf, and as you toss it, you'll release the trauma it represents, you'll forgive yourself and forgive others, if that's part of the story, and you'll be relieved of that burden forever…”

“Can I add in a couple more I've just thought of?”

“Add as many as you like—it's your life you're cleaning up.”

I think I managed to cram in about four other somewhat less prominent burdens before the weight of the stone began to cut into my hands. And then, with all my strength, I tossed it over the cliff.

And immediately—and in all honesty—a great wave of peace flowed over me. Until that point I must admit to having a healthy dose of skepticism about this whole procedure. But the sensations that followed the release of my rock convinced me that something had changed. I felt lighter—buoyant, almost. There was even, for a fleeting moment, a temptation to step off the cliff edge and allow myself to float with the gulls, circling over the surf far below on the updrafts of cool, spray-filled air currents.

Michael was bemused. Doubtless he'd seen similar reactions from many other workshop participants. “Better stand back a bit there, David,” he said.

I nodded. What I had released at that cliff edge was a memory—long buried—over a particularly sad event in my life and the life of my father. Except it wasn't his life that was the memory—it was his death. A death that came far too abruptly at a time when Anne and I were away on one of our world wanderings, but also at a time when those years upon years of noncommunication with my father were finally being bridged. Conversation was still a little difficult, but at least we'd had a few enjoyable times together—sketching and talking—followed by lunches in local pubs and a little more tentative outreach on both our parts. And then, just when it looked as if we might be able to open up a whole new relationship, I left to complete a travel book. And then he left shortly afterward—by dying.