Swimming Lessons

It’s with great pleasure that we share these illuminating conversations with Joanne Greenberg. Though we’d felt a strong and warm connection with Joanne for many years, it wasn’t until the focus and depth of these recording sessions that we really started to experience her profundity. Interestingly, beyond the perspectives she shared, these far-ranging conversations appear to be taking us on an unexpected journey: one that’s inviting, positive, and affecting our creativity in an unmistakable way. Clearly, beyond what she knows, her life force is playful—and contagious.

Today’s podcast is the first of a three-part series, which we’ve titled, Swimming Lessons. Though our conversations were casual and often humorous in nature, they were set against Joanne’s personal experience of drowning in her mental illness.

We also knew she’s witnessed so many others in varying states of drowning, as have we, which brought a subtle life-and-death sobriety into the atmosphere. This didn’t produce solemnity—just an honest, shared knowing of the territory being discussed. When drowning is the condition at hand, the confused flailing to just survive is so disorienting that it’s almost impossible to know what will actually be helpful. However, in such a time, one can learn to swim, and this series of podcasts is all about doing just that. As someone who has completely recovered, Joanne is an expert, having learned to swim free from her mental illness. And as she poignantly described, once freed from the deadening nature of that illness, her passion for life carried her into an experience of living that was—and continues to be—joyfully beyond her sense of what was remotely possible.

After having had a full career of working with people and families experiencing extreme mental challenges, I recognize what Joanne is pointing to as essential knowledge—like points on a compass with which one can orient to a resilient recovery path. She emphasizes the vital importance of having genuine, kind, and honest human relationships. Among other benefits, these relationships can help one recognize what’s real in order that there be ground outside of the dream world of one’s illness. And if medications are used, which she’s not against, it’s absolutely crucial that one’s wakeful innate intelligence—so necessary for the process of recovery—is not obscured. Perhaps her most central insight for what compels and sustains a path of recovery is that the payoffs of being ill must not outweigh the challenging but natural invitation of ordinary, healthy life.

After nearly 60 years since its best-selling debut, there’s a reason I Never Promised You A Rose Garden is still powerfully relevant. You’ll hear and feel that in these podcasts, and I sincerely hope that Joanne’s compassion and life force will be as contagious for you as it has been for us.