HomeDan Keusal, M.S., LMFT
Jungian Psychotherapy for Individuals & Couples
"Find Your Purpose, Heal Your Pain, Live With Passion"
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Spring 2025:
"Cairns and Sentinels"
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Greetings...
This newsletter looks at two everyday encounters that suggest sources of guidance and support in this troubled world, and in doing so empower us to respond.
As we move from Winter to Spring...
Take good care,
~Dan
* * * * *
Reflections: “Cairns and Sentinels"
One morning after Inauguration Day, with my heart deeply troubled, I felt called to venture out into the cold yet brilliant winter sunshine and go and sit on the beach, to seek out the wisdom of the deep waters of Puget Sound and the enduring counsel of the Olympic Mountains.
From my seat on a large piece of driftwood, I looked to my right and saw another log, stretching from the beach out toward the water; at the end of that log, perched precariously a foot or two above the sand, someone had stacked two small stones, a kind of mini-cairn.
Cairns have long been used as navigational aids along trails. To encounter a cairn is to be reassured: Yes, you are still on the path. Others have passed this way before you. You are not lost. You are not alone. Keep going.
A few days after my sojourn to the beach, I went for a walk in the woods. A tree that had fallen across the trail in a windstorm a few months back now lay in pieces off to the side, cut, I imagined, by a dedicated Parks Department employee with a chainsaw. How long had that tree stood beside that trail as a faithful sentinel, watching over those walking their dogs, or those whose walks in the woods constituted a contemplative tending of their troubled or simply discerning souls? I took a photo of one of those now-cut pieces of the downed tree and counted: 51 rings, 51 years. Half a century that tree had kept vigil. I wondered how long its cut pieces might sit beside that trail, serving as sentinel, as attentive witness, from a different vantage point.
These two images—the cairn, and the sentinel—might be seen as metaphors for psychotherapy, and for life.
Psychotherapy is about having someone stand as sentinel beside your process, providing a safe container, and presence, and witness, and occasionally offering some guidance. It’s about learning to pay attention, to spot the “cairns,” the signs, the guideposts that show up for you. Those signs are easy to miss, given the barrage, the din, of news, social media, advertising, and other external forces, all advocating the agendas of others, designed to distract you from your own, deep, true, inner voice. And this cultivation of attention is not just a passive activity; it is also an active call to seek out the sources where life’s cairns are likely to present themselves, offering their insight, counsel, and inspiration.
Jung once wrote “When we heal the individual, we heal the collective.” Doing your own healing work allows you to move out into this often-troubled world from a place that is more centered, grounded, calm, and to do what you can serve as cairn and sentinel for others who have lost their way.
In the midst of composing this essay, the most recent newsletter arrived from a colleague whose work I respect and whose occasional collegiality I treasure. He shared a quote from Rumi (such synchronistic arrivals are yet another form of cairn): “The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” That, I think, is what I was aiming for in sitting on the beach and walking in the woods—to become quieter so that I could hear more.
And that is what psychotherapy and life call us to do, in part through some sort of daily “practice”—call it meditation, reading, journaling, walking, sketching, gardening, running, yoga, playing/singing, even just mindfully breathing. Such practices help bring us back to ourselves, and from that place better recognize the cairns we encounter, to understand the directions in which they are pointing us, and to become aware of the watchful, attentive, even protective eyes of the sentinels that are standing vigil over our lives.
We can all help each other do this: become quiet, hear more, and then bring the fruits of all that out into the world.
Dan Keusal, M.S., LMFT, Psychotherapist. (206) 523-1340. Email: dankeusal@dankeusal.com
