The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

November 7, 1984

Dear Paul,

The time has fortunately come for me to communicate with you. I'm sure you know from Dean that I have been in contact with him and that I spent some time with him last week. He gave me all of your writings, the monographs and Letters to Dean, and both Jon (the man with whom I live) and I have been reading them avidly. We had all of your books and we both have read them but we are both seeing in your recent writings a development of your ideas expressed with great clarity.

I want you to know that the real reason for this letter is to tell you how deeply grateful I am to you. My feelings for you, my teacher, are very deep and throughout these past years your high standards for me, your belief in me, your empathy towards me, your wisdom and your words have been with me. In my most helpless and dark moments your wisdom has come to me and gave me the strength to once again continue on my way. (You always told me just to listen to you, even if I didn't understand, and when I needed it your wisdom would be there.)

My father (one of the founders of the Communist Party) was victimized by his political fight against society and his legacy to me was an undeveloped depth of feeling and a strong faith in a better world, in which people help each other. Having met you at such a young age -- at 19 -- you were the truly revolutionary teacher my father couldn't be, and you offered me the friendship and empathy and true understanding of life that my father couldn't offer. I have, despite much confusion and weakness at times, always kept your ideas alive within me, and they have become the foundation for my own self-discovery, discovery of truth, and communication with people in my personal life. Your courageous and pioneering journey is to me a role model and example for my own entrance into and participation in the world.

I have been back in New York City for one year and I am having a relationship with Jon whom I met in Chicago three years ago. He is the first man I have met who immediately recognized the true importance and value of the theory and on his own initiative sent to Libra Publishers for your books and read them. He is extremely intelligent and has a tremendous ability to understand ideas and recognize the truth. He came from a background of being raised in an extremely isolated Catholic environment, and his search for meaning until he met me was really pretty much confined to reading books for the ideas they discussed. He has a masters from Harvard in human development and when I met him I perceived his great independence, and at the same time his isolation from any human world in which he could be free to be himself with support and love. He also had been very seduced by the church and somewhere inside himself still believed that he should be a priest, an idea which made him feel trapped and therefore had never become a reality.

When I met him I was attracted to his strong want to grow and his openness to me as an equal with whom he could develop his life. He had, on his own, realized that a man and a woman could not be free to have a true relationship if they were homophobic and on his own he had been working on freeing himself from the conventional male role (which he was totally unprepared for). In these past three years he has become more and more interested in the theory as the foundation for his understanding of himself, for our relationship with each other and our being in the world, and he has totally left the church and his need to be in academic structures (institutions). Presently he has his own moving company, creates stained glass light boxes, and together we are reading your writings.

These past ten years have been for me a time of learning how to make my own growth process support me and how to enjoy my life. When I first withdrew from Lee, I understand now that my need for independence was much greater than my ability to stand, and I rebelliously flew into a relationship and a marriage which was extremely harsh and intimidating, but which taught me a tremendous amount about the power of conventionality and its reality in most people's minds. When I left my marriage I knew I needed to learn how to protect myself creatively to develop my feminine identity and learn how to balance myself without submitting to the traps that exist in this society. As you know, these traps are especially strong for women, who are allowed to remain helpless, or on the other hand are supported, especially these days, to become powerful career women whose compulsivity and aggression is seen as a part of their "new" identity as women.

In the transition between the end of my marriage and my meeting Jon I had to come to terms with myself, my true nature, my aloneness and what my choices are in this world. I came to a point where I realized that nothing was important to me other than my own development and expression of my true femininity and that I would not settle for anything less than an honest life in which my own ongoing growth process is my foundation. During this time I had many relationships in which I learned a great amount about myself and I developed and was supported by three very important and creative friendships. At this time I became a word processor to support myself, something I am still doing to make money.

During this transition I also became very interested and involved in studying dance and human movement as a way to connect with my whole self and integrate my mind with my body. Dance really gave me the space to be with myself and find the psychic rest I needed. Through dance I came into contact with something called the Alexander technique, which I studied through having lessons for two and a half years. Very simply, the Alexander technique teaches people through the use of simple movement and a clear knowledge of the anatomical design of the human body, how to observe themselves as they move through their lives and how to use themselves with greater understanding, control and self-knowledge. It teaches people to become conscious of their habit patterns and to be able to become their own teachers to support themselves and intelligently flow with and direct their own ongoing developmental processes.

I realized as I was studying the technique that this was something I could teach which would allow me the freedom to be independent to be able to study people, to learn and to help people through my own understanding and view of life. I am now in a teacher training program studying with a woman who is very supportive of me and trusts my knowledge and feeling for people. I am also working with about six people a week with whom I am having the experience of learning to reach people through being myself. I am finding that I am using both my knowledge of the technique and my understanding of people and of the theory to reach people and teach them to creatively enjoy their lives and to see their lives as a developmental process, to believe in themselves and trust their symptoms as the tools to understand themselves and the world around them. This is the truth you taught me, which set me free to find myself and develop.

You also taught me that in order to reach another person I must first be committed to my own growth and that it is my awareness and honesty that is the foundation for a healing and therapeutic relationship between myself and other people . . . that in order to teach I must first be a student. This truth has become very real to me. The work I am doing is still in its pioneering stages. And I am realizing how much in the unknown I am in this work and that it is my discovery of my own truth that is my greatest tool.

My relationship with Jon has given me a great amount of support to be able to enter the world in my own terms. With him, I am entering into the unknown of this world with less anxiety and more enjoyment than I have every before experienced. In the past year I have experienced a new depth of feeling and union with Jon, and the beginning of a much greater understanding of what it means to be in a mated and polarized relationship. We are both consciously working toward being together without any conventional or automatic roles, with our foundation being our commitment to the development of our own and each other's true natures. Our direction is to bring what we are learning and who we are becoming more fully into the world.

In closing this letter to you, I again want you to know how very thankful I am to have known you, and how grateful I am for your work. And as my own life is unfolding, your ideas and the example of your life is very much with me.

With my warmest wishes and my love to you,
Laurie

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 5, Winter 1985

See a 1990 interview with Laurie about Paul