In the practice of Sacred Attention Therapy, or SAT, we spend a lot of time being. My kids used to ask me, What do you do at work dad? And I used to say, "As little as possible." This isn’t precisely correct of course, because not doing can be as hard as, or even harder than, doing.

One of the reasons we go to see a therapist or counselor is that they are not too eager to interfere. The mature and good counselor takes time to intervene, allows the client time to talk, feels into the client’s reality, and, because he is able to be and not just do, he is able to firmly set his own personal material to one side.

 This setting our own material to one side is tremendously important, because it is only in receptive emptiness that we can resonate with another. Think about this for a minute. The blank canvas is a gift to the artist, as is the empty note pad to the wandering poet, the piles of wood and bricks to the gifted builder, and the uncarved block to the artist-sculptor. Therapy too is an art and, as we set our own material to one side, so we are more able to help our client to understand herself more deeply and in time heal. But in order for that to happen the client before us paints her picture for us to see, acknowledge, and validate.

Validation, recognition, and acknowledgement are fundamental needs. Mostly as children we have not had enough of these. Take your own children, or somebody else’s, to a play park and you will learn this very quickly. Look at me! cries the child excitedly propelling herself down the slide, whipping up a storm on the swing, or recklessly riding the roundabout. As many times as you can respond with, Great! Yes! Well done! Brilliant! the child returns with the repeated demand, Look at me! It seems as if the need for validation and recognition could go on forever.

Most of us did not receive the attention we hoped for and needed. We wanted more, we deserved more. Sometimes more in the sense of more and more times, but often simply more in the sense of a quality of attention -- the need to have all the attention or someone's total attention.

In SAT we give our attention. We give all our attention, every bit of it, and if we cannot do that, then either we should be doing something else or we should learn how to do it. All therapy, at least in the first stages, is remedial. Remedial means making up for lost time, filling in a deficit, giving love and awareness into a seeming void... though it turns out only to be a child’s need for validation, for recognition, for some affirmation that “I exist.”

Blog entry #167

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].