Overview

The first time I ran a Persian poetry circle for Iranian-Canadian clients in Vancouver, I was not sure what would happen. I had assembled a small group, picked a few short pieces from Hafez and Rumi and Forough Farrokhzad, and asked everyone to bring a poem that had stayed with them. We sat in the office, drank tea, and read. What happened in the room over the next two hours was not what I would have predicted.

People who had spent years in conventional therapy were able to access material — old griefs, half-formed longings, identity questions — that had been hard to reach in clinical conversation. The poems gave them language they did not have. The poems gave them permission.

Evidence summary

The poems, I came to realize, were doing therapeutic work that I, with all my clinical training, had not been able to do alone. This article is about why Persian poetry is so effective as a therapeutic resource — for Iranian- Canadians and, in many cases, for anyone who reads it in good translation — and how it can be incorporated into healing work without losing its essential nature.

A literary tradition built for the inner life Persian literature is, more than perhaps any other major literary tradition, organized around the inner life. The great poets — Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Khayyam, Attar, Nizami, Rabia, more recently Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri — were not primarily entertainment.

Care considerations

They were, in most cases, contemplatives whose work transmitted a sustained inquiry into the questions that depth- oriented psychotherapy now revisits.

What is the self- What is suffering for- What is the relationship between the visible world and what lies beneath it- What is the work of being human- How do we love- How do we lose- How do we let what happens to us shape us into something larger- These are the questions Hafez wrote ghazals around in the 1300s. These are the questions Rumi danced through in the Mathnawi.

Next steps

These are the questions our contemporary clients walk into our offices carrying, often with the felt sense that the questions are theirs alone.

When I bring a line of Hafez into a session — the doors of the cage opened by themselves; my heart, the bird, did not fly out — and a client begins to weep, what is happening is that they are recognizing themselves in something seven centuries old. They are not alone in the question. They never were.

Overview 5

What the poems do, clinically Several things, in my experience, happen when Persian poetry is brought into therapeutic work: They give language for inner states that everyday speech does not name. Delam tang shode — my heart has tightened — has no precise English equivalent.