What is the relationship between our need for counselling / psychotherapy and our spiritual or transpersonal experience / journey?

I agree with Ken Wilber and Richard Harvey (amongst many others) that counselling and psychotherapy are necessary in order to free us from the compulsive ways of being that keep us trapped, and that this ‘normal’ way of being needs to be worked through to find a fuller connection with the spiritual.

Being psychologically ‘trapped’ does not exclude us from spiritual experiences but it does limit it (also Jack Cornfield). Ken Wilber has made it clear that we can move into a spiritual experience at any level of consciousness, or to put it another way, at any stage of our ‘ego-development’ or maturity; also how our spiritual experiences are usually temporary integrations of the self, which do not last. These can be tiny glimpses or big profound experiences which can act as a compass for our lives, opening a vision of the potential we have to live in a very different way. However in order to achieve a lasting integration of our selves, it seems that there is no avoiding the hard work of growing up, of development and maturation, through developing our self-awareness and self-knowledge of all three aspects of ourselves, our feelings, our thinking and our sensation / bodies.

Our experience of the spiritual is, I suggest then, something that emerges from an experience of being more whole or more integrated than our usual, partial, experience of ourselves. Most importantly it is a felt experience, not an idea, and the closer we stay to actual experience without interpretation or theorising, the safer the ground we are on. Such experiences are usually mediated through the lens of our heart. head or body. If our heart is the lens then it is a space where our hearts are opened to love in some expanded way. If it is our head, then there it is more about our expanded consciousness of some sort. If our bodies are the focus, we resonate with a different energy. It may of course be any combination of these, or all three together. But they all support the experience of moments of ‘being’ where we are aware of feeling uncaught, of being freer. where we experience a sense of our aliveness more objectively. It is an experience of being present to ourselves in the ‘here and now’ with a greater degree of freedom, especially the freedom from fear.

Everyone is different, with different “wounds”, which result in different strengths and weakness, and the task of therapy is to start to repair these wounds which means also developing a more rounded self. For some, knowing and understanding their feelings is the most immediate need, for others making sense of their experience, for most of us attending to our bodies and knowing its structures of tensions and sensations, is important. All this is the hard work of increasingly knowing, and facing, and taking responsibility for ourselves. The feeling side can be especially difficult work, due to all the hurt and anger from trauma (in it’s widest sense) that we ‘buried’ in order to survive. This ‘buried’ part creates what Jung called the “shadow” (Jung) sides of ourselves, the negative and rejected aspects of ourselves, which need to be re-owned and accepted if we are to become whole and able to carry on expanding our spiritual connections. This is where the whole, that is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, can start to transform our lives.

But spiritual experiences can also support us in facing this work. All the AA twelve step programmes around the world are based on this understanding. This transpersonal dimension can contain us and help to make meaning out of all the hurt, anxiety, depression etc., that we feel at times condemned to suffer. Experiencing the spiritual dimension of life can support our underlying sense that there is meaning in life, that we are a part of a cosmic process, where consciousness and love want to be known.

One of Gurdjieff’s favourite phrases, concerning the possibility of our development, was about our need for “conscious labours and intentional suffering”. I understand this as being about the two distinct aspects of our nature. On the one hand our need to take responsibility for ourselves, for our choices. We are not human without ‘choice’, it is a necessary and essential aspect of our nature and in the end we are alone here, no one can choose for us, we have to choose to ‘work’ on ourselves, to forge our consciousness. Then on the other hand is our need for awareness and understanding and relationship and the support we need in order to face and open to the suffering we hold out of awareness, facing our hurt and anger consciously. This aspect we can not do alone. We are also intimately connected to the whole universe. So we are alone and not alone.

These are two interrelated, but distinct, existential strands in us and they relate to many of the paradoxes and polarities in life, from the left and right in politics, with the right emphasising personal choice and responsibility and the left emphasising the need for support; to the balance between support and challenge needed for growth; to the difference in emphasis between change and acceptance; to many arguments about what is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way, in many areas of life.

But to return to the main point here; our greatest freedom and true nature is spiritual, it is beyond our psychology onto a profound connection with the transpersonal. This requires the transcending of our ego, which as I understand it (but have not achieved yet!!) is an amazing and extraordinary achievement; something that I do know however, is that this can only be built on the foundations of knowing ourselves really well.

I have further explored this in my article “Talk on Therapy & the Spiritual” on the “Article / Essays / Talks” page.
(Updated Feb 2012)