May It Please the Court, Lawyers Just Want to Be Happy : Psychotherapy: Float past Mars, be one with the solar system, popular seminar counsels. Program borrows from Carl Jung, Zen consciousness, 12-step programs, holistic healing, even Clarence Darrow.
Floating past Mars and gazing back at the solar system, the lawyers are urged by a soothing voice to come back in, way in, to visit their bodies and talk to their cells.
“You realize that everything is connected. One. And it’s pulsing with you,” psychotherapist Pat Webster intones as two dozen attorneys gently rock back and breathe deeply.
So goes what is perhaps the oddest lawyers’ workshop in the nation. No talk of “quid pro quo” here. Webster and lawyer Bill Thorp have for years been taking attorneys beyond the world of briefs and billable hours to get in touch with their inner selves.
Lawyers, often regarded as shysters and sharks devoid of an inner self, get a bad rap, Thorp insists. They’re nice folks--really--and often just need some spiritual nourishment.
“Contrary to the popular opinion, I think lawyers are wonderful people. They are really caring, sensitive people,” said Thorp, a North Carolina attorney in practice for 43 years. “A lot of them just find themselves on a treadmill. . . . They’re losing the idealism that brought them to law in the first place.”
Thorp and Webster, who are married, try to turn things around for unhappy lawyers in a workshop that borrows bits from Carl Jung, Zen consciousness, 12-step programs, even Clarence Darrow.
A recent workshop at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in the Hudson Valley attracted lawyers from around the eastern United States. As Omega hosted other weekend workshops on shamanism and being embraced by the light (dying), the lawyers occupied a tiny cottage and reached for higher consciousness.
There was dancing. There was communing. And there were a lot of lawyers disillusioned with their profession.
Participants complained of judges more interested in clearing dockets than in justice, missing dinners with their children, slimy colleagues who think all’s fair in law, and never being able to poke their heads out of the endless minutiae of motions and briefs.
It’s enough to burn a lawyer out.
Gary Holland, a young attorney from Daytona Beach, Fla., disliked life at a law firm so much that he started his own practice.
“It’s more than money. It has to be heartfelt. . . . If it isn’t, I feel myself unfulfilled and empty.”
Eileen Clark of New Jersey described growing up thinking lawyers were all like Perry Mason. She thought a career in law would bring her money as she did good things. Instead, she struggled with a nonstop grind at a big law firm. Overworked, she finally pleaded with her senior partners: “Don’t you understand you’ve squeezed the orange dry?”
Thorp, white-haired and speaking in the cadence of a Southern gentleman, explained to his harried colleagues that the enemy standing in the way of having the practice they want is self-doubt. Offering his own life as an example, Thorp said he used to represent cities and railroads “but I wanted to sue them.” Now he does, since he took a big leap and started a civil practice in Chapel Hill, N.C.
“I’m more comfortable sitting on the front porch of a family’s house getting information than I am sitting in a corporate boardroom,” he said.
But the journey past self-doubt is an unusual one in this workshop. Before guiding lawyers on a tour of the solar system, Webster asks participants to “imagine that you are a clipping from a plant and a root begins to grow from the base of your spine.” The lawyers are later given crayons to draw a shield representing their values.
Sound flaky? Not to Webster, who points out the workshop goes beyond “new-age froufrou.”
Webster uses established visualization techniques to get the lawyers primed for self-exploration. Participants are asked to list self-beliefs that keep them from changing. Then they’re asked to turn it around into a can-do statement.
For instance, thoughts that money isn’t spiritual can be turned around to “money allows me to manifest my spiritual ideas and visions.” Likewise, lawyers go through group exercises to help them shed ideas that they don’t have the time or energy to create a more fulfilling practice.
Webster, who admits to stereotyping lawyers as greedy and insensitive before getting to know her husband, drills into participants that “you are worthy of a life and a profession that is worthy of your soul.”
Bill Van Zyverden, a kindred soul who took a workshop with Thorp years ago, said more and more lawyers are benefiting from such a humanistic outlook. The Middlebury, Vt., attorney cites the growing ranks of his own group, the International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers, as evidence. Thorp is one of 400 members.
“That kind of thinking that you need to create your own reality is something lawyers need to do more of,” Van Zyverden said.
Coming into the weekend dejected, many of the lawyers said they were heartened to find other lawyers sharing the same values. Others said they felt new possibilities.
“If you can get a group of lawyers together dancing in circles and getting in touch with themselves, you can do anything,” Clark said.