Wishing You A Glorious & Peaceful New Year 
a Publication of the New Jersey Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in CounselingPurpose:
Experience the Joy and Good Will of the Holiday Season
While our electronic sophistication allows us to showcase our modest association and link to interesting and informative sites, our real strength is in our personal contacts. Most might agree, counselors in general are pretty nice people. But I think, those that have joined our association have especially gentle souls. We are exploring spirituality, calling attention to ethics and in essence are promoting diversity and religious tolerance. Special thanks go to our members that have taken the time to share a little of who they are by attending our meeting/workshops. Since we have given ourselves exceptionally nice evaluations, it just adds to the perception that we are a healthy association. Indeed, we are strong in number and financially solvent.
My new year request is for a few of you to step forward and agree to help keep NJASERVIC moving in a positive direction. We need a president-elect to begin serving when E. Betty Levin takes over the presidency July 1, 2002. We need a secretary and a treasurer. The secretary attends our meeting and takes notes so that we have a record of what we are doing. We have averaged one meeting every three months. The treasurer monitors our spending. It is a fairly painless responsibility since NJCA took over paying our bills. The President-Elect gets on the job training which leads to a delightful journey of counseling leadership and a seat on the New Jersey Counseling Association Executive Council. How about it? Isn't it time for you to be a little more active? Contact me, your current president, Michael Lazarchick if you are willing to discuss the possibility. I guarentee it will be a worthwhile experience!
On Sunday the 21st of October, NJASERVIC had a peer support workshop for counselors on the theme "Counselors Responding to the Tragedy." Judy Harrow facilitated. Thank You Judy for a wonderful job. I work in Wildwood which is just about as far away as anyone can get from New York City if you live in New Jersey. The workshop brought me a lot closer to the reality of the tradegy.
Nancymarie Bride was there. She told me she just knew she had to come. The Workshop was the first break she had allowed herself since September 11. Nancymarie is a mental heath counselor in private practice and the executive director of the Mental Health Association of Union County. With a big heart and quality credentials, this was not her first disaster, but it may well be the most demanding. Nancymarie Bride has been intimately involved with the coordination of mental health services since day one. We listened to her experiences. The WTC rubble is less than 15 miles from her home in New Jersey. When the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, she smells the human decay and fire that was still burning on the day of our gathering. She told us about people hiding in the rubble because the "depressed" rescue dogs needed to find someone alive.
Nancymarie's cell phone kept ringing. It gave me a sense of urgency. I reflected on her non stop giving, answering the crises hotline, doing debriefings, working with rescue workers and other victims of the tragedy. First she moved the phone to another room. Eventually, she finally turned off the phone. She needed this time for her own healing.
I told her how I was in conflict, an antiwar pacifist who feels like he just received the bloodiest of punches to the nose. She related the similarity to domestic violence. If you do not act to stop the violence, it will escalate!
The workshop time flew by. Nancymarie thanked us. She was not there for answers. She just needed to talk openly and have her colleagues listen. She turned her phone back on. It rang. I gave her a parting hug. She had no more free time.
We are living in a time when the world seems turned upside down. The sense of security that we have all felt in this great nation has been truly shaken to its core. We miss life as we have known it. We are told to go on with our lives and yet be watchful.
How do we deal effectively with what has happened to our sense of well being in these troubled times? How do we cope? How do we stay centered and move ahead with our lives feeling an internal sense of safety?
This requires us to draw upon 1) HEART: to love ourselves and others, to reach out with concern, to remain open and receptive, to be appreciative and non-judgemental…2) SOUL: to meditate, pray, feel, express our truth without fear, to think, to remain silent when called for…to go within to the wise place that dwells in all of us, to be present and observant…3) SPIRIT: to Live Life, to laugh, experience joy in the small and in the grand…to participate…to take action…
Each day we must summon the courage to move ahead despite what is happening in our world…to look and listen with "heart," to find creative "soulutions" to whatever problems are presented to us, to imbibe the "spirit" of life. It is joining and utilizing these most important gifts that we all have, that we will find the compassion, strength and conviction to continue this wondrous journey of life.
