Bye-bye, Brugh

Last December, Brugh Joy passed away.  Brugh originally had been a doctor.  He'd interned at Johns Hopkins and finished his training at the Mayo Clinic.  He was a practicing physician until a bout of pancreatitis steered him toward alternative medicine.  Brugh dove into energy healing, Jungian work, and dreams.  He left his medical career and began leading self-development workshops.  Michael Crichton wrote about his experience at one of Brugh's seminars in his book Travels.

My wife and I do dreamwork once a month with a couple of friends who are students of Brugh's.  In 2008, they got me into one of his weekend workshops, in Chicago.  It was an amazing experience!  At the first meeting, he led a heart-centered ritual that inducted everyone into the work for the weekend.  I was amazed at how this one 80-something man could work with all 25 of us, taking each of us deep into the work.

In the evening, after the last session of the day, Brugh was chatting with me, when he casually put his right hand on my chest and his left on my back.  I felt intense energy flow through my chest, blowing my heart open.  Every morning, we'd do dreamwork.  He'd call for dreams, and he'd go around the circle and got right into the meat of each dream immediately.  And the dreams I had while I was there were very big, very vivid, as if Brugh's presence had evoked powerful forces from my subconscious.

This turned out to be my only chance to work with Brugh in person.  Brugh had had pancreatic cancer sometime in the 1990s and had fully recovered.  He was in such good health that he went on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet a couple of years ago.  But in 2009, he was diagnosed with a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer, his third experience with pancreatic health issues.  This time, there was no recovery.

The way Brugh worked with treatment for his cancer, and the way he approached his death, was a lesson in itself.  He treated chemotherapy as if it were a holy sacrament.  He was totally open to whatever happened, and he met his own death with a sense of wonder and curiosity.

Most of the people in the Chicago group had known Brugh for several years, some for a couple of decades, so I was surprised and grateful when I received email inviting me to a celebration of Brugh's life with the rest of the group.  I went with my friends to Chicago last Sunday, and we all gathered again.  We sat in a circle, conducted a Brugh heart ritual, and shared stories.  Brugh was certainly there in spirit.

I'm grateful to have had the chance to work with Brugh.  He helped me come to terms with my chronic pain condition.  He showed me that working with the physical body is a valid spiritual path.  His advice to find some type of body movement practice, such as dance or martial arts, led me to tai chi, which has been very good for me on a number of levels.  So even though I knew Brugh for just a little while, I'm going to miss him.

I Need a Fix

I attended a Brugh Joy workshop over the weekend, a wonderful experience. It was my first Brugh Do. Working with Brugh and the group incubated a series of huge dreams for me Saturday night, which we worked with in group Sunday morning. I left the workshop with many new insights and a load of material to work with.

The first evening, Thursday, Brugh asked us to introduce ourselves and maybe mention something about the process that had drawn us to his workshop. I happened to be the person he picked to begin the introductions. I was new to Brugh's work and didn't know more than two of the other participants, and much of what I've been experiencing over the past couple of years has been physical and difficult to put into words, so I was not very forthcoming.

As the introductions wound around the room, some people would bring up some pretty big issues in their lives at the moment, and Brugh would work with them a bit, along with the group. They all seemed to be old Brugh hands, people he knew. For one person in particular, Brugh jokingly said he was going to have to hit her over the head.

Friday night, I had the following dream: I'm in a mall, vacant except for myself and a young man in black clothes. He seemed to be a high-school athlete. We stood beside a large pile of shipping cartons. I knew that each contained a large, black, soft, overstuffed toy, bats and boxing gloves, mainly. The man told me I had to donate a few thousand dollars to him, to buy the whole pile. He then would distribute all the toys among the townspeople, and they would hit me with them.

When I woke up, the dream didn't seem to make much sense. Saturday morning in group, Brugh asked who'd had dreams. As he began working with people's dreams, I leafed through my dream journal, looking for what I thought would be something deeper. But Brugh made it clear that he wanted only dreams from the night before. As he worked his way around the room, it began to dawn on me what my dream was about, so that by the time he got to me, the meaning was unmistakeable. As I related my dream to the group, everyone laughed, and I said, "And I know it's all about the fact that I need to share my process with the group"--which, in fact, was the whole point of the dream.

I did share with the group my struggle with chronic pain over the past couple of years, how it had drawn me into my body, and how that seemed very alien to me. And the sharing seemed to trigger a night filled with dreams, many of them very vivid and insightful and nearly self-interpretive, so that the next morning in group, when I related one of the dreams and Brugh and the group worked with it, I knew exactly what was going on.

One of the biggest insights I received was that in order to resolve the chronic pain, I'd had to move my mind out of the way. My body had had to heal on its own terms. It did not want to be diagnosed and fixed; it had to come into wholeness via its own internal wisdom. The pain condition was in one sense a teaching for me, that there are some things that are not resolvable mentally, and that throughout my life, in such situations, my mind had been more of an obstacle than a help. Thought can be seductive and addictive, but like all addictions, it creates more problems than it solves. This is maybe the largest and most difficult nugget I extracted from the workshop.

So, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Karl, and I am a thoughtaholic...