A decade ago, Brenda Donahue, then 43, could barely walk. Faced with the prospect of a spinal fusion to treat a degenerative back condition, she searched far and wide for a less invasive alternative, with little success.
She was ready to try anything when her five then-teenage children persuaded her to study Chung Moo martial arts, a combination of techniques dating from the Han Dynasty 1,500 years ago. But she was far from persuaded that it could save her from risky and complicated surgery. And she had no inkling that Chung Moo, combined with her interest in Jungian dream analysis, would lead her to a Native American healing tradition known as twisted-hair medicine and a unique outlook on life.
Interviewed about her physical and psychological journey, Donahue recalled with a grimace her initiation into Chung Moo:
“For a long time I hated the sessions and watched the clock for the whole 20 minutes. I had not exercised since high school, and everything hurt. Entering the door of the martial arts school, my persona was stripped away. I was no longer a wife, a mother or a professional woman with community standing. Even my children stood ahead of me and knew much more than I did.”
Despite such an inauspicious beginning, martial arts training ultimately enabled Donahue to redirect her life energy and repair her back without surgery. Now she is a healthy, active 54-year-old with a vitality that belies the weeks she lay bed-ridden, dependent on anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving drugs.
Donahue had difficulty finding a cure for her back problems, but her training as a registered nurse and licensed clinical social worker made her aware of the source of her pain, unsettled events from her childhood in an abusive home.
“I believe we hold our experiences of pain and anguish in the body,” she said. “My parents did the best they could, but an inability to deal with the uncomfortable aspects of my childhood caused me to carry the patterns of unexpressed fear and expressed aggression as chronic pain in my lower back.”
The slow process of physical healing began with daily martial arts movements that often caused Donahue more back pain and a great deal of emotional turmoil.
“Nobody felt sorry for me, nobody coddled me,” she said. “My teacher sometimes came into the practice room, took one look and said, `Hmmm-lazy.’ Because his attitude activated unresolved issues within me, I hated him. I could not see his love through the mist of my own fear and aggression.
“But as I began to detach from my childhood, my emotions became unlocked and flowed freely. In pursuing a natural form of healing, I saw my pain had more to do with my emotional than my physical life, something surgery never could have addressed. Martial arts forced me to look at my rigidified thoughts and emotions and release them through the movements.
“I was learning balance, coordination, speed, timing and the ability to relax into pain in order to hold the positions. A feeling of oneness with my inner being developed in a way I had never known. My practice took place in an atmosphere that appeared to be dominated by masculine aggression, yet my body said I was experiencing something deeply feminine and rooted in nature. The masculine harshness of my childhood gradually gave way to a yielding feminine perspective that helped me begin to heal.”
Donahue said her dreams at the time indicated something powerful was happening within her. Once she dreamed that during practice a wise old man and his wife invited her to walk and talk in the forest. She felt so loved and cherished that she decided to bow her head and learn everything she could.
“I knew then that my training was important and linked with knowledge as yet unknown to me,” she said. “When I realized my teacher instructed out of love and concern, I was freed from the tyrants of fear and aggression. He recognized I was there to confront the woundedness in my body and to alter it. He gave me the tools, and the rest was up to me.”
A few months before beginning martial arts, Donahue had resigned from a teaching position at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn to pursue analyst training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Evanston, a non-profit adult education center dedicated to the work of the late psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. As she participated in these two new activities, she learned to her surprise that working with the body could be as effective as working with the mind.
After three years of training, Donahue’s Jungian analyst, Mary Loomis, introduced her to Harley Swift Deer, a twisted-hair elder of Cherokee and Irish descent and head of the Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society, whose teachings were passed down to him by his grandmother, Spotted Fawn, a full-blooded Cherokee.
“The twisted hairs are members of a medicine society that twists together knowledge from different tribes,” Donahue said. “Knowledge is added to the general body on the basis of whether or not it works or can be applied.”
The Crow Lodge of which Donahue is a member is a twisted-hair medicine society for women that promotes knowledge and understanding of the feminine consciousness honored in matriarchal societies such as the Cherokee.
Donahue said certain twisted-hair concepts, including the psychokinetic energy force of orende and the medicine-wheel system of dividing ideas, forces and the physical world into four directions, provided her with yet a different lens through which to view her martial-arts experience.
“I came to understand that my work in the practice room and in the analytic hour were similar,” she said. “As I was changing old patterns through dream images and mental energy in analysis, I was using the body and physical energy or chi in martial arts. By working on both the mind (which is masculine) and body (which is feminine) planes, I was becoming balanced in my life energies, a process known in twisted-hair teachings as `dancing the wheel of life.’
“The concept of the wheel became a way for me to reflect on martial arts and focus on my balance and development. One of the first forms I practiced was a series of movements that faced each direction in turn. It was this series, which I called `tree form,’ that strengthened my back and taught me how to make pain a friend.”
Just as her back pain was transformed from the image of an enemy into an ally and teacher, so any kind of problem we all face can be used to lift us beyond day-to-day existence to a more meaningful life, according to Donahue.
“My journey of self-discovery is not unique,” she said. “Everyone has a chance with something in life where a tyrant can become a teacher. This is the basis of the Jungian goal of individuation, becoming whole and undivided from a union of opposites that is the masculine and feminine force. In martial arts, the masculine mind and the feminine body are unified through the movements to develop the spirit. In twisted-hair parlance, `We come into this world to dance our sacred dream awake.’
“When we balance the wheel, we get in touch with the sacred mystery within us and strip away everything except what we need to dance the dream awake. We may not know what the dance is we are dancing, but once in a while our hearts recognize what is right for us, and that is the path we should follow.
“The way of the warrior recognizes the life energy we carry as sacred. The warrior learns to protect life energy by facing, containing and transforming the negative energy that arises from encounters with tyrants in daily life into positive energy that serves our growth and development.”
Donahue said she discovered that her sacred dream is to help others absorb the concepts she mastered in her battle against chronic pain and apply them to managing their own problems.
“From a very early age I was curious about what makes people tick, what makes life meaningful and difficult,” she said. “While I especially admired women medical doctors, I was more concerned with becoming a doctor of the mind. Later I was influenced directly by the late Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, author of `On Death and Dying,’ and one of the founders of the hospice movement in the United States. She brought a feminine consciousness into everyday life in an area that desperately needed it.
“Kubler-Ross taught me that living on Earth is like being in school-so many lessons to learn, and the only choice is how to work with them. I think women today especially get caught in a reactive or victim stance in life and lose sight of the lessons contained therein. I help them turn their tyrants into teachers and expose them to life’s possibilities.”
By combining in her mind these seemingly unrelated disciplines-Chinese martial arts, Native American healing techniques and Jungian dream analysis-Donahue has weaved strands of each together to form a lens on life that she shares through workshops and seminars.
Her essay, “The Way of the Warrior: One Metaphor for Individuation,” appears in “Psyche in Sports,” a Jungian perspective of sports and exercise to be published by Chiron this fall.
Donahue’s teachings attempt to integrate Jungian theory, twisted-hair concepts and rudimentary martial arts movements and breathing exercises developed with Dr. Sheng Li Wang, who trained at the University of Beijing.
In a recent workshop at the C.G. Jung Institute, the participants, 19 women and one man, said they attended hoping to “gain more energy,” “deal better with life’s issues,” “ease the struggle” and “find out who we really are and what makes us happy.”
Vivian Hood, 47, a legal secretary from Palatine, said she would like to study more with Donahue, whom she considers a very spiritual person. Hood was first exposed to the work of Carl Jung in the early 1980s when she became interested in psychology.
“Everything I read or learned about during that period seemed to involve Jung,” she recalled. “I participated in a dream workshop that blew my mind. I really didn’t know much about Jung, but I was absorbing his teachings almost by osmosis.”
Hood demonstrated an enviable grasp of Jungian philosophy, which she distilled as: “We have all the knowledge ourselves deep down; it’s just a matter of getting out of our heads and dialoguing with ourselves.”
Donahue elaborated: “If men and women can step outside their experiences and deal with external tyrants such as anger, fear, power and death, by containing rather than diffusing energy, they can begin to use that energy as a teacher. What is released in the encounter is a more balanced world view that develops a deep acceptance of others.
“Women are taught to have and demonstrate their feelings, but not to hold or reflect on them. Men are taught not to have them at all. Yet when we lack emotion, express it in inappropriate ways, or are close-minded and rigid, we lose energy and are out of balance.”
Donahue credited her husband of 30 years, a telecommunications entrepreneur, with being her balance beam through the years.
“One day I asked him how he dealt with daily rejection and the worry of running a business,” she said.
“`I don’t listen to the 99 no’s,’ he replied. `Only the one yes.’
“Often we’re so frazzled by disappointment that we miss the next opportunity. Yet when we learn to transform negative emotions into positive ones, we can look inside ourselves and be compassionate. And as we come into alignment with who we really are, we dance our sacred dream awake.”
Donahue said she considers herself fortunate to have learned how to transform her back pain into a tireless teacher that brought her into physical, emotional and spiritual alignment through many “exciting highways and byways.”
“Twisting together different forms of knowledge and experience into a path for myself and my back took me on a wonderful adventure that I delight in sharing,” she said. “I appeal to those who want to dance the wheel and turn tyrants into teachers. I teach them to reflect upon their experiences, to become more mentally receptive and to allow their emotions to give them energy. When they make that commitment to themselves, their lives become imbued with meaning.”
