…In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. 
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

T S Eliot, “East Coker”, The Four Quartets[1]

In spite of everything that we can learn in training to practice psychotherapy, we remain largely ignorant. Faced with another being”—whether we call him “client” or “therapist”—we are confronted with this choice: will we follow the well-trodden path of dead ritual, of conformity to the known, or will we accept the challenge to “be” together in the moment, with “what is”, to step into the unknown. This demands great courage. Very often what we “know” is a hindrance.

What I love about my work most is that it presents me with so many opportunities to grow. It is the most fulfilling work I can imagine. I remember, shortly after I started to make my living from practicing therapy, seeing an article in a tabloid newspaper that asked the question “Who would you most like to be?” I realised that I really most wanted to be me! And it was a wonderful feeling and a privileged feeling to realise that I was who I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do.

Further down the road in my life as a therapist, I often feel that it wouldn’t really matter what I did as a job anymore. Somehow everything seems potentially growthful. When I earned my living doing jobs I resented, becoming a therapist seemed like the only way. Now I practice therapy for a living all activities seem like the way.

In this deep meeting between who I am and what I do there is healing. For many years of my life I felt despairing, disconnected, inauthentic—a deep sense of something lacking—which gave rise to all kinds of problems. The problems sometimes were dazzling. They were fascinating. So intriguing I never got through them deeply enough to identify and understand where they came from.

I now know that at their source was a deep experience of separation. My activity was separate from my identity, I didn’t feel my feelings, I didn’t know that I had a body, I experienced intense periods of “divine longing”^[2], projected outwards and reflected back to me in all sorts of frustration and unfulfillment.

My experience is not, however, that all these limitations are behind me. The truth is hard to write about. In so many ways I am still the same as I ever was. I might say, as Ram Dass has said:

In all my years (of self-exploration)…I don’t think I have got rid of one of my neuroses. But what has changed is, instead of getting so caught in them and taking my personality so seriously, I invite them in for tea!^[3]

It is a matter of simultaneity. It is a matter of levels”—of not getting stuck.

The difference between the “me” of today and the “me” of a few years ago or so is that, whereas I used to live out a narrow segment of the spectrum of my life’s possibilities, I now try to be open to the mandala of my life – a whole 360 degrees of potential and experience.

In this all things become opportunities for growth. I can learn from all my life situations. Not that I ever did otherwise. But what took most of my effort was getting through my resistance. And my resistance came out of the separation between who I (thought I) was and what was happening to me. From my wanting things to be a certain way and not wanting them to be another way.

When a person comes to work with me usually some form of this separation is evident. So, too, is his^[4] resistance. I wonder what is preventing him from experiencing his life. Because what holds our beings away from life is something that therapy addresses very well.

Each person carries with them a story. The story is one of adventure and danger, of threat and survival, of gifts and loss. There are good characters and bad characters, all sorts of interactions and private moments, promises, disappointments, agonies and ecstasies. This is the drama of all good stories. We are each of us attached to our story. It is, in a sense, who we are. At least we think it is.

In fact, it is who we were. And somehow our attachment to our story, our possessiveness of it as we clutch hold of its constantly unfolding drama, results in it being who we become, who we will be. For the future is only as real as the past, when all things are known. And we know our past. And so we know our future, when we are attached to our story.

What I have to offer is a space for the person to tell their story in, to be their story, to bring it slap-bang, manifested into form, into the room. So that we can look at it and say “Is that who you are?”

The new story that unfolds in the space is the story of who we are. As I meet this person in my awareness, as both our attentions are trained on the process, on the present, on what is happening, something new must take place. It must take place because we are letting go of the past by bringing the past into form, by telling the story, by listening to the story.^[5]

As Lao Tzu puts it:

What is in the end to be shrunken, Begins by being first stretched out. What is in the end to be weakened, Begins by being first made strong.^[6]

A modern Jungian, commenting on the myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal, speaks of the mourners as models for psychotherapists. Their…

…echoing makes a litany, transforms the pain…It makes out of life’s dark misery a song of the goddess. It establishes art as a reverent and creative and sympathetic response to the passions and pains of life. And it shows the potency of such a litany. For with their mirroring song they ransom a goddess of life.^[7]

As the past, the known, is acknowledged we are opening a path to a future that is unknown. We are making it possible to be, to be in the present moment. And all life, all existence takes place in the present moment.

This is where transformation takes place. This is the condition for true experience. This is where you find your real self, your authenticity. This is where identity and experience may become one.

And yet the present moment is overwhelmingly threatening. It relives memories of life-threatening situations. Before our stories were ever written inside us. Before we had answers and defences, before we found a way out of an intolerable present.

I have learnt to be more comfortable with fear, to work with it as a friend. It is interesting how the more I befriend fear the more hidden fears become. Not only am I now less afraid, but also my fears have become subtler, deeper and less specific. Fear is just fear!

When I realise that, it is very useful. I have to be afraid of something is how I think. I am afraid is how I feel. So fear latches onto the present moment, the vast unknown in which anything can happen.

Objects for fears are like subjects for anger, objects for needs and so on. The object is a projection of our separation. Object is a word and words create our confusion.

The “I” wants to dominate, exclude, make boundaries and divide the self in which we are all one.^[8]

The outer world of objects confirms the inner world of experience. How is it possible to relate to pure experience, to experience un-objectified and un-projected?

Meditation techniques surely provide a way and therapy complements meditation. In meditation the journey is inside-to-outside. In therapy the journey is outside-to-inside. I had always empathised with eastern spiritual thought: philosophy and practice. In western psychotherapy I discovered a counterpart. Put the two together and it’s like digging a tunnel from both ends!

As we wind our projections back in, a great responsibility falls on us. No longer will we be able to hide behind our range of excuses. No longer can we blame the other. We are responsible for our successes and failures – responsible even for defining what these terms mean.

When we are fully identified with our experiences then we are ourselves. When I am my experience and my experience is no longer objectified, I am no longer separate and it seems to me that inherent human qualities of true relationship may now manifest.

We talk so often of kindness, of caring, of compassion and love. The words are commonplace. I find the actuality of these qualities is more common than we acknowledge. If I use my awareness, am in the present moment, not separate from my real experience then everything can appear to me as love and compassion.

Am I projecting a new level of reality? Maybe, but the desire for enlightenment is a singular desire:

The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.^[9]

And when I do not feel separate then I open the way to great joy and ecstasy in my life.

Which brings me back to “tolerating” experience. Most of the people who come to work with me (like me once upon a time!) want to be “happy”. How can I tell them that deep is deep, that experience is experience, that being just “is”. I find that to tolerate pain brings with it the ability to experience joy and vice versa. I find that there is actually no separation between the two. They are one figure, one experience. When I am with them, without resistance, I am alive, I experience life.

I would like to discuss what I sometimes consider my philosophy: Awareness – Acceptance – Letting Go. In a way awareness is all. Acceptance flows from it. Letting go is the experience of choice, the experience of change.

Awareness is our natural state, our birthright. I can still remember when I was about thirteen year old starting into a new day with the vivid consciousness that the world had somehow become more dull. I remember saying to myself, “Surely I used to feel more alive once”. I had distant memories of experience being more vibrant. Something had been lost.

I had a similar experience when I was seven. Then I had fallen into a deep reverie on death itself. Isolated in my absorption I could only explain to the adults around me that I had a stomach-ache. They felt younger than me. I thought they would be scared of what I was experiencing. I wanted to protect them and I wanted to be protected. Consciously I was afraid of death, unconsciously I was afraid of life, and both were the unknown to me.

My life is the answer to the question of death. I sought the undying, the eternal in many shapes and forms. My emphasis was on the seeker and the search. My life used to take me further away from the deathless.

The very bottom is a place from where you can only rise. It is like the man running from his own shadow who

…did not understand that if he had stayed in the shade he would have lost his shadow, and by standing still he would have ceased making footprints.^[10]

Out of stillness awareness will arise and acceptance will grow. Practicing awareness, seeing “what is” is the powerful halting experience when we are out on a search. We listen to the silence between the words; we see the process around the content. We become a witness to our participation in experience and in this we can truly learn.

The power of my rational mind still dazzles me. As I go on in my bewitching acts of creation what I know is complemented by what I don’t know, what I can speak about is partner to the unspeakable. The practice of awareness connects all of this in the relationship between the human and the divine.

So out of my ego creations, my personal dramas, awareness leads me to my heart. This is the experience of coming home. This is where the authentic self lives. This is where I find myself and where the mystical journey, the transpersonal journey, into my Higher Self can begin.

I see the point of choice, of letting go, transformation and change as taking double effort in a way. There is a deep connection between the Higher Self and the human. The human side must often surrender and in a meeting with divine space”—transformation.

This is the closest I can get to an explanation. Why else are we sometimes left waiting so long? This is an attempt to understand, to speak of the unspeakable.

Resistance to surrender is painful.^[11] The model of identity is strong. It feels life-threatening to let go. I am (usually unconsciously) attached to my drama, embarrassed and ashamed about owning that and fearful of forsaking it. Yet I know that freedom lies beyond it. In the moments that I transcend it, form meets with the formless. I experience my wholeness and may glimpse the all-embracing interconnectedness of all things

BLOG entry #70