The wasteland in T. S. Eliot’s poem as well as in The Quest for the Holy Grail is a metaphor for our state of being when we’re not living our lives from our hearts. When Knight Parsifal, who is seeking the Grail, first encounters the wounded king of the wasteland, he’s moved by compassion and wants to ask the monarch why he’s suffering. But, having been trained that knights don’t ask unnecessary and intrusive questions, he stifles his spontaneity and compassion and at this point his quest fails. It takes him an additional five years of struggle and failure to make his way back to the Grail Castle and to ask the questions that come from his heart rather than follow the rules of decorum for knights.

Knowing the right questions reflects the maturity Parsifal has gained through the committed struggles of his quest and begins the healing of the wasteland. It is a paradox that if we cannot open our hearts to ourselves then we have no foundation for dealing with other people lovingly and compassionately. And, like Parsifal we’ve been trained not to ask loving and compassionate questions of ourselves, not to question our depressions and heart attacks deeply and lovingly because to do so might upset the value systems we and our society live by. Instead, the system teaches us to go to the refrigerator, buy something, go to the movies or out to eat if we are feeling lonely, anxious, or distressed. But feeling bad and going to the kitchen sets up a cycle that cannot be eased or healed by diet plans, willpower, or medication. Our real needs are deeper than what these palliatives can help. We have to pay better attention to ourselves.

Yes, in spite of our interests in exercise, fitness, and nutrition, we still deny many of our bodies’ needs. We work out to improve them, but too often we are treating the body like an “it” rather than the seat of our souls. We judge our bodies harshly against media ideals and frequently seem to disassociate from them. We rarely give them enough sleep, rest, and sensual rewards to keep them calm and relaxed, and sooner or later our bodies are going to teach us we’re human. Heart attacks, depression, obesity, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia are but a few of the ways our bodies do this and insist that attention be paid.

In many of these circumstances we act as if our bodies have betrayed us, when actually they are more often our friends warning us when we are endangering ourselves. For instance our bodies know when we’ve inadvisably ingested bad or tainted food and reflectively expel what they must. Similarly our bodies issue “warnings” in the form of scares, those small reality episodes that are meant to wake us up to the changes we need to make. And, sometimes our bodies give us important signals about our emotions when we’re hungry for love, personal fulfillment, or vitality.

When Janice who was (doing sessions with me) started crying at work and couldn’t stop, her body had taken over. It quit functioning like a machine that day at school. It’s ironic that she would say she despised her body, that she felt it was her enemy because it fell short of what our ideals for women’s bodies should be, and yet it was this body that began turning her life around.

The hurried pace of our lives discourages us from actively reflecting upon our needs and looking deeper than the material level. When we fail to understand them for ourselves and to share them, we cannot live from our hearts. The point here is that we then live by other people’s concepts, calculations, assumptions, or inclinations- right for them but maybe not for us. By probing our own inner lives, we give our relationships a better chance to succeed. Intimacy is about sharing. It is reciprocal. And when we relinquish or lose touch with our hearts’ desire, we leave ourselves in danger of being dissatisfied with life without realizing why.