Introducing Haiku for Healing

Welcome to Haiku for Healing, a new series of blog posts with Sonam Chhoki.

At the conclusion of the Haiku for Parkinson’s (H4P) project initiated and run by Stella Pierides in 2024, Jim and Stella approached me with the idea of a follow-up project. I had organised a year-long H4P email course and as Stella was stepping down, I was asked to take on the role of coordinator. Thus, the concept of Haiku for Healing took form.

George Swede is one of the first to explore the potential of haiku as a healing tool. His 1978 article, “The Role of Haiku in Poetry Therapy” looks at how haiku helps one “to move away from their inner world and look outward, to things other than the self” in the healing process, as he mentions in my interview with him next week.

There is a long and rich tradition of the use of poetry/words as a restorative device. Growing up in western Bhutan, I remember the local oracle’s songs of healing, not only of physical ailments but also of the landscape and the relations between neighbours and families. In the annual invocation to the principal guardian of the valley the oracle seeks her protection from natural calamities, diseases and conflicts:

Of august lineage
since the days of yore
You’re the queen-goddess
of cattle and land

Untouched by summer floods
the winter fires, the icy winds
You reside

The fear-destroying moon
is your parasol
the luminous stars, your crown
the life-giving sun, your heart

Please make your presence
Please accept our offerings

Give us your blessings
for the cattle we graze,
the crops we raise,
fill our cane-mats
with the fruits of the earth.

Keep illnesses away
from our children, the elders,
our families and neighbours.

Let there be no quarrels
in the neighbourhood,
in the village,
in the valley

We bow in your sacred presence
envision your auspicious face,
May we be blessed this year again. *1

Milarepa (1040 – 1124) the Tibetan yogi-poet is renowned for his songs of compassion. His counsel to the hunter is popular in the Bhutanese oral tradition:

Whatever you fear you see as your foe.

But in past lives this creature was your own mother.
Your arrow will kill the deer
But not the Five Poisons within you.

Slay your hatred and be free! *2

This guidance is not dissimilar to the reflections of Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180) the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher:

“What need is there of suspicious fear, since it is in thy power to inquire what ought to be done?” *3

His Meditations is often cited as one of the earliest therapeutic writings. Penned during his campaign against the Germanic tribes in 170, Aurelius muses on the complexities of life, death, losses, moral choices and human nature. It was intended as an introspective search for his own inner equilibrium as he faced war and disease (plague broke out during this battle):

“Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquillity.” *4

Nearer home to our poetical world, For Anatole’s Tomb by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898) was inspired by his son Anatole, who died aged eight in 1879. In over 200 fragments/verses the grieving father writes of his raw sorrow and pain:

…what do you want, sweet loved vision – who often come towards me, and lean over – as if listening to the secret (of my tears) – know that you are dead – what you do not know? – no I will not tell you – for then you would disappear – and I would be alone weeping, for you, me, mingled, you weeping for yourself child in me the future man you will not become, and who am left without life nor joy. *5

In our own time, the contemporary Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish (born 1978) writes with an urgency amidst militarised borders, razed homes and orphaned children:

To That Room

And I return
to that house,
to that room,
the bones of the dead beneath me;
they know me
though I do not know them.

I’m surrounded by the books and papers
of other dead;
I know them
though they do not know me.

This earth: the remains of strangers
naturalized by death.

I return
because one must return,
because the dead must rise again. *6

George Steiner (1929 – 2020), the literary critic and philosopher, in No Passion Spent noted that not since Gutenberg’s invention of printing has our world known such a revolutionary and sweeping shift in the dissemination of the written word by the medium of the internet. *7

The relatively easy access to online haiku journals certainly helped me realise its salving potentials. A few examples:

lighting butter lamps
your death anniversary
what else can I do? *8

reading
Ensui’s Girls’ Day haiku
I mourn the child we lost *9

sunless morning
and yet . . .
sunflowers in Auschwitz *10

quake-destroyed shrine
a raven on the stone Tara
questioning the dusk *11

what I couldn’t say . . .
first anemones
in the spring rain *12

Today, we’re the most globally connected that we have ever been. In this implosion of communication and connectivity what does haiku with its intrinsic minimalism and “thusness” offer the individual? How have we been able to explore it as a healing tool? This feature looks to examine how haiku facilitates healing in diverse circumstances such as physical illness, bereavement, estrangement and displacement.

Coming up next week: an interview with George Swede exploring his perspective on the potential of haiku as a healing tool. 

If you have any questions about Haiku for Healing, please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

My deep appreciation and thanks to Lori Zajkowski for volunteering to help me with the Haiku for Healing blog posts. She has been an invaluable support in putting this project together. A big thank you also to Dave Russo for his guidance and help.

Notes:

*1. My translation of the local oracle’s song repertoire.

*2. My translation of the local oral tradition of Milarepa’s song. See also: The Hundred Thousand Songs, translated and annotated by Garma C.C. Chang, Shambala, Boulder and London, 1997.

*3. Book X, 104, Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Collins Classics, 2020, Great Britain.

*4. Book VII, 65-66, Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, Collins Classics, 2020, Great Britain.

*5. 57, For Anatole’s Tomb, Stéphane Mallarmé, Trans. with an Introduction and Afterword by Patrick McGuiness, Fyfield Books, Carcanet Press Limited, Great Britain, 2003.

*6. 69, No One Will Know You Tomorrow, Selected Poems, 2014 – 2024, Najwan Darwish, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid. A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

*7. No Passion Spent, Essays 1978 – 1996, George Steiner, Faber and Faber, London 1996.

*8. Frogpond, 33:3, Fall 2010, 12, Jack Galmitz and Paul Pfleuger, Jr., eds., Per Diem Archive (The Haiku Foundation website), 2011, “Trends” Under the Bashō [Web] 1.1 (autumn 2013 — Best of … section) Don Baird, “Ahh, the Light Passing” [editorial], Under the Bashō [Web] 1.1 (autumn 2013) Bruce Ross et al., eds., A Vast Sky (2015), 151.

*9. Asahi 16 March 2012.

*10. Mainichi Shimbun: Best of 2014.

*11. A Hundred Gourds 5:2 March 2016.

*12. Otata 25, January 2018, haibun: “Crossing the line”.

Bio

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

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