Interview with a
Healer
By Saira Jamal
November
10, 2003
for
Professor Rosalva Varghas-Reighley
Cross
Cultural Counseling
I
smell the sweet perfume of citrus as I walk into the intimate room.
The chairs are placed in a horseshoe shape with a flip chart set
up at the front. Many
participants are already seated, talking quietly to each other.
Some of us are sweating from the movement of our dancing just a
few moments ago. The room is still as all eyes turn toward Kelly, who is
seated at the opening of the horseshoe.
“Welcome,” he says warmly.
His crisp, blue eyes make contact with mine and others. He has shoulder-length, wavy brown hair, and is wearing a
bright red Hawaiian shirt with dark pants.
His slippers are black and his smile is contagious. And so we begin.
In writing this paper, I have created an opportunity to look at
my teacher in a new way. His
name is Kelly Tobey, and I met him at one of his workshops when I was
fifteen years old. His healing work has touched every corner of my being, and
has helped me to grow into my fullness.
His story is one of someone who started as a rebel and is now a
great mentor…a diamond in the rough.
He speaks candidly of his life experiences while doing his work,
and has created community where there was none prior.
He inspires me to use my own experiences in aid of other
people’s healing. He
reminds me to trust my intuition, and shows me how, ultimately, I am my
own greatest healer. Here
is a small piece of his story.
The
Healing Work
When asked to name what he does, Kelly used the phrase “sacred
psychology”. His work
integrates the body, the mind, the spirit, and the emotions “to help
people uncover their gifts”. He
described in the interview how gifts are often hidden under past traumas
or fears, and how he provides a container within which the process of
self-discovery can unfold. Indeed,
the work he does is “sacred”. He
uses guidance from Spirit, and a “direct hook-up” to know where to
take a process or which questions to ask.
He distinguished the difference between “the small ‘e’
ego” and intuition, in that the latter is never demanding nor forceful
in its messages, but rather provides gentle suggestions.
An explanation of the logistics of his work may help to better
understand the nature of his healing.
Kelly does one-to-one sessions, drop-in group sessions once a
week, weekend group workshops, and annual ten-day retreats.
I have personally attended all these formats except individual
counseling, both as a team member and as a participant.
The focus of the interview was on Kelly’s work with groups and
his team.
He has trained with more than eighty different facilitators, and
is knowledgeable of a vast amount of literature in psycho-spiritual
healing. From the methods
he has learned, Kelly has synthesized his own unique method of healing
work, or in his own words, “sacred psychology”. The four areas he focuses on are the mind, the body, the
spirit, and the emotions, and he often leads exercises that highlight
how to bring these four elements into greater balance.
The bulk of his work is aimed at emotional healing.
He described how he supports his participants in “the awareness
of the emotional body”, and encourages them to “befriend it rather
than be disconnected from it or overwhelmed by it”.
As mentioned earlier, his guidance comes from Spirit, who directs
him in the moment in re-using techniques he has already mastered, or by
introducing new methods he has not used before.
He told of how over the years he went through a process of
“filtering”, where he had to learn to distinguish true intuition
from his own ego. His goal
in his healing work is to set up a safe container, and then work within
that container with whatever comes up in the group. He does body work, if called for, during private sessions.
During group workshops, the team members engage in both bodywork
and energy healing with the participants.
The
Team
Kelly’s team is made up of past participants who have a strong
sense of his guidelines and style.
Becoming a team member is an extensive process, and Kelly puts a
lot of energy in choosing and preparing the team.
Kelly related, “You could write a whole paper on just that!”
Without going into too much detail, let me try to describe the
role of the team members. These
are people who are part of the group workshops being of service to
Kelly, the participants, and each other.
While Kelly is engaging the “focus person”, team members
attend to other people in the group who are being triggered.
For example, if the focus person is speaking of his recent
divorce, someone else in the group whose parents divorced when she was a
child may have an emotional response.
At this point, Kelly would continue to work with the focus
person, while a team member would support the other person.
This support could come in many forms including nurturing touch,
massage, and working with the energetic blocks of the participant.
Kelly described how having the team present allows him to go very
deep with the focus person, as he has witnessed that “the team is
capable of providing support for the others”.
In this way, the whole group benefits from any individual
process. The group also
feels “nurtured by the family” of Kelly and his team. We also discussed how through this type of group
facilitation, Kelly is able to help bring healing to the community of
participants, rather than just the individual focus person.
He explained how this was actually quite subconscious for him,
but how community building is becoming a more conscious part of his
work.
A
Cross-Cultural Healing Modality
I enjoy Kelly’s group work, and find it to be a concept that I
find very attractive. As I mentioned earlier, new communities have sprung up out of
workshop participants coming together in support of each other.
It seems to me that where Kelly’s work goes, community arises.
These are groups of people that share a common language and who
have a strong desire to be more than their wounds.
As part of one of these communities, I have found my fellows to
be ready to offer a hand in help, or a shared laugh, or solemn presence
at funerals and other rites of passage.
In the midst of individualistic psychotherapy, I find Kelly’s
style to be about looking past the individual to the whole system.
That is refreshing for me, as I am from a collectivist culture
and family system. I find
that his emphasis on seeing the perspective of the other also aids in
the cohesion of groups of people. This
focus is so rare in mainstream psychology.
Though I did not remember to specifically ask the question of
cross-cultural healing, I do find it very much alive in my experience of
Kelly’s work. An example
of this was the recognition and celebration of our cultural differences
at the last ten-day retreat that I attended.
We sat in a circle and named the ancestors and land from which we
came, as well as naming the First Nations tribes that shared the land we
were presently living on. This
created pride for me in my cultural heritage, and also showed us as a
group how we represented the four corners of Earth.
People from many different backgrounds have attended Kelly’s
sessions. As an
Indo-Canadian woman, I find his methods to be inclusive and culturally
sensitive….and he is not afraid to ask for clarification if a cultural
assumption is being made. The
work Kelly does seems to stretch across cultures and reaches for the
commonalities of the human heart and soul.
Life
Experiences Leading to the Work
Personal Tragedy
The emotional component in Kelly’s work is very powerful.
As a past participant, I have noticed that the emotional insights
I have received through his work are immediate and enduring.
In the interview, he described how emotional healing was not
something that he had been taught through his culture.
His family system did not encourage emotional exploration, nor
did his formal education. Though
Kelly had informally practiced his healing art psychologically,
spiritually, and through the body, he did not start earning an income
from it until he was in his twenties.
At this time, he was working in group homes with at-risk youth.
In his thirties, Kelly loved a woman named Diane.
She died in a mountain climbing accident, and Kelly was with her.
This tragic event “cracked (his) emotional body open”, as
Kelly dealt with the grief and loss.
He was wide open, and trying to support himself in any way he
could. One of these ways
was through his emotional body. As
he worked on himself, Kelly described how he realized that emotional
work could actually help other people too.
During the eighties in the place he lived, he found there was
very little emotional healing taking place in a formal setting, and
recognized that “society was starving for understanding at a deeper
level”. The uncovering of the power of emotions was a key; the missing
portion of the equation of holistic healing.
Insights
Reached Through the Work
I asked Kelly if there were any personal insights he had received
due to or during the course of his healing work.
After joking a bit about how there were “millions to choose
from”, he pinpointed a couple that stood out for him.
The first of these insights has to do with his “pattern of
approval addiction and being a people-pleaser”.
He discussed how in order to do this work, he really had to look
at this part of himself. This
was partially to “avoid burnout”.
This involved many things for him, such as learning about
boundaries and how to openheartedly say no to requests.
In the past, he tended to agree automatically, without really
checking in to see how he felt about a request.
During his people-pleasing moments, “there is no room for
Self”. This is an important area of learning for a healer, as he or
she can often be overwhelmed by the needs of others, forgetting his/her
own physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
The second area we talked about was the impact Kelly’s work has had on his own family of origin. He told me happily about how more and more of his family members are “warming up to the work”. Kelly recalled, “At one time in my family system, I did the rebel thing and took off.” He went on to explain how he came back with all these new ideas, and how he really pushed for change. This push, however, was met with harsh resistance. He remembered how he was “coming from a place of moral superiority” and how he could not seem to get through to his family.
Through
this, he learned a huge lesson, and had to learn "to let go of
needing to be right about any system of ideas". Now, Kelly tells
about how he offers tools, information, and insight, while honoring the
other person's choice of whether it is right for them or not. He also
learned that pushing brings up the rebel in participants, which
ultimately slows down the process. Here, I commented on Kelly's
persistence with his family in how he kept sending out brochures and
inviting them to come out to events. He qualified this by saying,
"Yes, it was a willingness to keep offering without the push".
Goals
for the Future
Kelly’s first response to my question of goals for the future
was, “to continue to spread the word to more places, if it is
wanted”. He is presently
doing weekend workshops in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Winnipeg,
and has been invited to host a weekend in Ottawa.
His message is a powerful one, and as a student of his methods, I
would love to see his exposure grow.
He also wants to be able to do events that are longer than his
annual ten-day retreat, as he feels that “after ten days, we’re just
getting started!” He also
spoke of compiling his synthesized learning’s into a series of books
so that “the information can be accessed”, while he’s alive and
after he had transitioned to the other side.
I feel privileged to know Kelly, and look forward to working with
him in the future.