ACA Blog

Almost twelve years ago I was given the opportunity to participate in planning the City of Kansas City, Missouri’s mental health court. It was originally designed for the mentally ill, who had been charged with city ordinance violations in Kansas City, Missouri. The program has expanded to include low level felonies from Jackson County Drug Court, and city ordinance violations in Lee’s Summit Municipal Court, Raytown Municipal Court, Grandview Municipal Court, and Blue Springs Municipal Court, all Jackson County, Missouri cities that are suburbs to Kansas City, Mo.

In a recent blog , I shared my view regarding the overlap between traditional counseling theory and yoga philosophy. Today, I will share how breathwork is a key element to yoga and to counseling. From a yogic perspective, the breath (pranayama) is the core element in yoga practice, more important than the postures themselves (asanas). I often remind my yoga students and my counseling clients, “remember to breathe”.

This week of working with my young clients took my thoughts back several years to leave me reflecting on my first class in Counseling Theories. Early on, I identified myself as a Rogerian. In the years following this first class, I began to resonate with parts of other theories, and found myself practicing and using various techniques. It was almost as if I had begun to take the therapeutic relationship for granted and assume it’s necessity, but not look carefully at its’ extreme and important impact.

Having lived out for the last 25 years, first as a gay boy, and very shortly after as a transsexual woman, I tend to maintain a level of cautious optimism about the LGBT liberation struggle. There’s always something in the news about our community, and I am very grateful that it’s no longer a given that we’re referred to using terms like “homosexuals” (in the cases of gay men and lesbian women) or “transvestites” (in the cases of transsexual women). Yet, there always seems to be another shoe that drops when we make any progress: a state or nation supports gay marriage, some entity vows to fight it and does so; schools make an effort to reduce bullying of LGBT youth in schools, someone in a position of legislative authority opposes it and fights it. The shoe that dropped this week, however, was that of none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, who declared his support of same-sex marriage.

A majority of voters who went to the polls on May 8 in North Carolina voted for an amendment that would add a new section to the state constitution stating, in part, “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.” The vote pertaining to the constitutional amendment was essentially a referendum on gay marriage.

[caption id="attachment_4859" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Jennifer Bingaman"][/caption] When I was in my Practicum, I was one of the fortunate students. My clients came every week. I carried most of my clients over from the first semester to the second. I ended up terminating with only four clients over the course of two semesters. It was lucky to have those relationships continue as long as they did because I gained a rich experience, but I didn’t get a whole lot of experience terminating the counseling relationship.

Now I cannot say that I really follow baseball nowadays; I tried to on a few brief afternoons off but the sport has become too slow with its allowance of what feels like lifelong ceremonies before each pitch. Adjust, limber up, adjust, strut, and approach home plate, pitch and repeat. By the second batter I was switching to something with more action, like watching paint dry. I am also not a gambler; I never had extra money that I felt I could just as well throw out the window as bet on anything with. Call me old fashioned but I believe in working for a living (not that I am against those who gamble). One thing that strikes me as very hypocritical though is the treatment of Charlie Hustle.

Many of you reading this are likely doing so just to find out what the heck I am talking about. I would guess that the majority of you have never heard of many of the words in my title. You may feel a bit lost, confused and possibly frustrated; I assure you that this was by design so that I could illustrate my point.

As a little girl when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I always said a million things. I wanted to be a teacher and a doctor and a farmer and a cowgirl. My little brain did not have the capacity nor the desire to break down my dreams into separate plans called A, B, or C. I also lacked the ability or desire to see life as a linear pattern of experiences. My baby brain saw a teacher/doctor/farmer/cowgirl. There was no either or. I didn’t compromise or negotiate my existence. I just knew what made me smile and decided I wanted to smile all of the time.

I missed blogging last week due to work I was doing in Costa Rica with a group of distance-based students. It was enormously rewarding in many ways, learning about both the local community as well the larger and varied texture of Hispanic culture representing different countries and regions of Latin America. It’s a real blessing to do the work that I do.