THE IMPOSSIBLE HOUR:
Remembering the Freedom of Healing in Our Times

The therapy hour. Who decided that our healing could be quantified: broken down in minutes, paid and bought and sold? When I first learned to heal, it was with a reverence for the mystery, the timeless place we enter together. I was all body: a dancer, a massage therapist. I’d learned energy balancing at a yoga training center.

I had also had a profound experience on a yoga mat at 16 years old in a community hall. “Focus on your third eye,’ the teacher had said. As my gaze centered itself on that point between my two eyes, the world fell away, or rather fell open, and everything in that simple room—the people around me breathing, the high ceiling, the feeling of night outside the walls— became one thing, touched by this feeling of ease, of kindness, of love.

Now, thirty-five years later as a licensed psychotherapist, I’m still chasing the mystery of that feeling of healing: the stillness that gathers around an insight, the way tears surface unexpectedly to show that some deep well has been hit where truth lies; how a moment can arise, just like it did for me that day on the cool community hall floor, and change everything.

I imagine villages and tribes, spaces where healing is part of breathing, and the tracking of tears a deeply revered gift, as important as the quest for a hunted animal, for food. Years ago, I interviewed a woman from another country about her spirituality and religion and she said in her culture there were no words for these things, because it’s just who you were. Healing too, a thing you do because it must be done; not a thing paid for and made possible for some and not for others.

I can feel this in my skin some days: the old stories, the songs, the way healing might happen through a whole community’s dance: bringing a fragile being back into its right shape not through one small dyad, separate; but through the whole interconnected warp and weave of a shared witnessing that discards shame, hiding or diagnostic labels.

Within the confines of an office, or a computer screen, within this timed hour, I am like an animal behind a gate, or in a cage, knowing the wildness is so much greater in us, that thing that connects us, than this fifty minute moment. How did we do this to ourselves? Somehow the same split that cut the mind off from the body sees healing as a quantifiable, discrete task that has a beginning and an end, rendered by an expert in a room to a sick patient like a shot, or a pill. Sometimes my clients themselves have been brainwashed by this concept, wanting me to heal them rather than also feeling the flow of healing inside them as a natural wellspring they can own, have access to for themselves, a place that belongs to all of us like the wide open space of my yoga awakening.

“Any thoughts on this?” one client asked recently in session, feeling herself get lost, her voice now taut and desperate. I could feel the tension in her, wanting to be rescued, and feel my insides curl at her request, knowing the answers are less about my words and more about reflecting to her this tightness, holding with curiosity why it’s there, what she’s most afraid of, until it can shift and open to something else, a warmer wisdom.

Even within the inherited box of therapy’s design, I’ve come to know a gathering that happens in that impossible hour. It must be entered with intention, and I notice the difference between a session wedged between insurance calls and my overfull mind, trying to control the world; and a session that floats in cloudless spaces, when I’ve had a moment even before it starts to ask the energy that shapes us if it would let me be of real service, be present to whatever wants to come through. In a sense, I return to the feeling in that yoga class and see if I can transmit it to others: not just through my words, but through the space I hold for us both.

Is that what heals us, heals others? Is it that same falling away feeling I once had that we are ok, that we’re connected and belong, that we are held in formless kindness? I wish that feeling for the ones I work with. Sometimes we actually talk about it, what it might feel like in the body to feel peace, not just as a concept but as close as breath, gathering like a blanket, a soft and fuzzy ease.

One client points to his eyes knowingly now when the tears come, laughing; ‘Here it is, here it is.’  We know that’s where the tide pool is, the place of undiscovered life wanting to be revealed and seen. After the surprise of tears there is usually some truth revealed, some insight gathered like soft wool, that begins to shape a different way of seeing, a new way of being in the world

Really being listened to coaxes healing, like a small animal from a cave. Our culture is so full of noise, that to lay out a blanket and sit together, under the stars of life, the quiet sky, lets what is true begin to surface until it can stop being abandoned, be included. Inclusion, the allowing of everything, seems to be part of the sacred task of healing, not just in our minds but in our whole selves, breathing into everything without tightening against it, betraying its truth.

Too many people in therapy come away understanding so many things about what happened to them but still not feeling that wholeness in their own skin, that sense of having been retrieved out of despair into a different clothing that lets them walk tall but also vulnerable, so they can feel how they might have felt when the world was new and their most innocent self was being born, and loved, fully allowed to be.

“I’ve done enough therapy to understand everything about my family, my history; but it still hasn’t changed how I live, how I react, what I feel,” a new client said last week, her voice quivering with frustration, and sadness. “I need something more, and I don’t even know what that is.”

Because of this, I want to ask those I work with: but what does it feel like? What would you notice in your breathing if the pain had been resolved, and opened into light? What would you notice in the way you move your body, talk to the world, form your most intimate thoughts?

When healing is freely embodied, it transcends time. The stories of our lives, tied to life’s more measured minutes in their detail or despair, can open to a place as natural as sun and as eternal, beyond harm’s reach, to the beginning of all things. We link to the places in us that once knew the world as family, the way birds know how to fly in arcs across the sky, turning at just the right inflection points, finding a shared rhythm: the beating of a heart, the drumming of time.

So I keep a clock just to the left of the couch—or my computer’s top bar and its clock—out of sight until I sense the end is close. I reference time like I would the weather: to know the contours of the day, how to walk through it, what the shape of it might be. But not to let that framework interfere or distract from the power of each lived moment, bound by nothing but our shared caring and the healing it allows.

And also to remember, deep in my bones, that I would do this for nothing; because it is like breathing to me. I require the giving back of the wholeness I once felt, until we all know we belong. Not because of anything we’ve done, but because belonging lives in us somewhere old and forgotten that can be remembered, anytime and anywhere: even in this office, its white Ikea desk propping up my computer with a life inside it, light radiating from a screen. When this belonging is remembered, we all breathe a little easier, as a shared ripple across the flat water that connects us.

The hour ends, just as this writing ends, life requiring of us some beginning, middle, finish. But the true story lives on, the water underneath these arbitrary signposts of time. I close my computer, my office door; my clients move toward their next life event. Maybe just for a moment we broke through the soil and found the source of all things, which can be carried, remembered in all of us, as the sound of moving liquid. This is something no place or hour can ever stop or contain; like the blood in our bodies: inevitable, alive.

A.S. Aubrey is a psychotherapist/writer working with trauma, chronic illness and identity. Her work has been seen or is forthcoming in The Poets Corner’s Art & Ekphrastic Poetry exhibit, Cathexis Northwest Press, Journal X, Hare’s Paw, Voices/1922 Review, The Bookends Review, Querencia Press and POETICS (Bainbridge Island Press). She was longlisted for the 2025 Westword Prize and shortlisted for the 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Her poetry chapbook ‘Hide & Seek: Poems for Being Found in a Lost World’ is forthcoming by Finishing Line Press in 2026. You can also view her Libre piece and video at https://librelit.com/2025/07/09/as-aubrey/. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where the urban sprawl inspires humor and existential angst.