One of my clients participates in extreme sports—rock climbing, sky-diving, bungee jumping. When he describes his experience of these pursuits he invites me into exciting, edgy, stimulating, adrenalin-filled experiences I will never have. In answer to my question why, his answer is always the same: It makes me feel real.

Another client sent me videos of her scuba diving off the Gold Coast among the Magnificent Ascidian and Loggerhead Turtles. Swimming in this subaqua paradise she is transported into a world of color and miracle, rather like flying, and she says she feels alive there.

By comparison my life is ordinary and unexciting. I walk on the earth, breathe the air, occasionally go to the beach with my family and love to burn leaves, dead branches and bracken on my land in Andalucia. As a therapist and author I spend most of my waking life simply sitting—listening, talking, feeling, thinking and writing.

The life of extreme sports or scuba diving is far from my personal experience, just a vicarious thrill to me.

Like many, I have spent a lot of my time being even more inanimate, immovable and un-thrilling—sitting in meditation, seeking the eternal, the infinite, God, Love and Compassion. Each time I made headway in this ephemeral, elusive pursuit I returned—not to the Source of existence, to Consciousness itself or to God—I returned to me, to myself, who was always waiting attentively, loyally and hopefully, trustworthy and devoted, poignantly expectant, like a little dog or a faithful servant. I would return with relief, a sense of homecoming and the familiar. Each time it was a defeat for transcendence and a victory for the ego.

It is not so much the return as the method of returning that has constituted the failure. I have clung to the body of fear and desire like a terrified child, like a novice climber on his first sheer rock-face—and it is not so much that either, as the fact that I have done this so often, while being totally unconscious of doing it.

Here is the last great illusion of the ego: that it can take charge, control you and manipulate you, without you ever knowing. You can be smugly celebrating your latest sacred insight, transcendent experience or world-shattering spiritual breakthrough, while behind the scenes the ego, resolutely dug in, firmly seizes the reins of your life. Like seeing wrong-doing where it is acceptable to the majority consensus or surprising a perpetrator in the act of committing a violent crime, simply to witness, to see it for what it is, is a daring feat, an act of heroism.

The heroic aspects of the spiritual life have always appealed to me—shedding illusion and delusion, overcoming oneself to find truth, removing the obstacles to Love and enlightenment. So when Jung announced that there was one last great journey left for man and that that was the journey within, I was thrilled. When Carlos Castaneda proposed erasing personal history, I was first in line to the fire with my photo albums and sentimental objects and when the singer-songwriter Mike Scott sung the archetypal lines:

I wandered out in the world for years, while you just stayed in your room. I saw the crescent. You saw the whole of the moon.

I knew exactly what he was singing about—I was the “you”, it was me, he was singing about my life.

But in spite of my thrill at self-negation, at climbing the mountain to enlightenment, or my staunch conviction that Jung was right and that the last great journey had always been the great journey, really the only journey, for humankind, like the extreme sportsman and the scuba diver, I was participating still in the world of subject, verb and object, rather than unity. I meditated, searched or made determined effort towards spiritual ends: me, the meditation, the goal.

Today I am a little older, and hopefully a little wiser. There are no spiritual goals, there is no attainment, there is no fear or desire; none of this is real. What is real is that God, Love and Consciousness are always, were and always will be, transparently present and available as ourselves. When we renounce the small world of me and become one with the Truth then what is already true is apparent and made real in our lives as kindness, compassion and contentment. It's not thrilling or extreme, neither is it ordinary or mundane; it is real, it is true and it is satchitananda—God, the Universal Consciousness and its essence is the same as the essence of you: existence, consciousness and absolute bliss.

BLOG entry #125

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Extreme Spirituality and Satchitananda’ was first published in 2011.

In the work of healing and personal growth, we start by practicing awareness, acceptance and deepening acceptance leads to change. Our emergence into freedom depends upon the profound experience of living our purpose and learning from life.

Life Lessons: The Call to Experience and Meaning

In the work of healing, personal growth and empowerment, we start by practicing awareness - seeing things as they are, witnessing, becoming conscious of identity, open, curious, suspending judgment. Awareness leads to acceptance - releasing us from judgment, permeating the ground of identity, flowing out of awareness into love of self, progressively entering the being state. And deepening acceptance leads to change, as we get out of our own way, let go, drop defensive patterns, venture beyond character, transcend resistance through grace, becoming more unpredictable, in harmony with our own nature and with Nature. Our emergence into freedom and to the next stages of transcendence and self-realization depends upon the profound experience of meaning, living our purpose, and learning from life.

When Jung said, "Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our time has not yet comprehended", he might have been talking about the twenty-first century. Our ability to live as if we had all the time in the world, with little need for searching and deepening into experience and insight is nothing short of mind-boggling complacency.

Complacent because unless enlightenment becomes the yardstick for humanity it is difficult to imagine a positive outcome to the modern era. As the physicist Peter Russell remarks: "A genuine love for the rest of creation... A deep affinity with everyone and everything... It is towards this goal of enlightenment of all that humanity must now move... If the growth of interest continues to swell, the evolution of human consciousness will then have become the dominant area of human activity... Self-development would become our prime goal."

Our lives are the living definition of the logic of our existence, if we can only penetrate deep enough to see. When we profoundly accept our life as it is, it yields great gifts and opportunities. We have become students - adepts as they say in the East - and we can look beyond fear, knowing that we are the only ones who are holding us back.

As you deepen in consciousness, you discover the sense of purpose and experience in your life which leads to genuine humility. When you become grateful for life and what it teaches you have become a student of life and when life is your teacher, you are open to the greatest of lessons. We are always faced with a choice: whether to meet life as difficulties and obstacles, sadness, misery and frustration, or as blessings, help, benevolence and abundance. The first choice leads to self-absorption, depression and becoming lost in the shadow. The second opens you to life's gift.

To learn from the lessons of your life is to accept in a dynamic and enriching way whatever happens to you. When you face your life lessons honestly and openly they help you to evolve and see past, the illusion of your separate self, deepen in your consciousness and reveal your true purpose. When you make a commitment to your conscious growth as a human being the lessons may be more difficult, but all the help you need is given to you and so you can deepen in your openness and receptivity to life.

Perhaps we intuitively know that to recognize and accept our life lessons will lead us into a deeper responsibility to life. We may no longer be so self-obsessed, as our hearts open and we become one with Existence. We can no longer carry out our defensive strategies in relationships and we are bound to be open and honest, since there is nothing left to hide.

Meaning and truth await us beyond the point of surrender where we willingly and totally engage with life. We need to feel our feelings and to deepen in our experience and ability to occupy the inner realms. We need to see through and let go of defensive and addictive behavior. Finally, where we meet the truth in ourselves with the authenticity and responsibility which brings we need to forgive... and practice forgiveness in our lives.

Being grateful for our lessons, grateful for life and honoring life's lessons through deepening in our intimacy with life, living in reverence and humility, we draw closer to our center, closer to our true Self and closer to the Source.

BLOG entry #124

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Psycho-Spiritual Development: The Fifth Stage’ was first published in 2011.

As individuals we desire to accrue and acquire talents and abilities to further our self-aggrandizement, but these are not the goals of psycho-spiritual practice. We are living in the era of holism and self-responsibility. You are not responsible for anyone else's inner work. Cultivate insight and understanding inside. There are two basic stages to wise practices in inner work: awakening and integrating.

Wise Practices: Reaching the Goal of Goalessness

In psycho-spiritual practice, if we accrue we add to our inner baggage. But we find it so difficult to engage in practices that reduce us and lessen us because we think that it diminishes us. After all the mind is not merely restless; it is restlessness itself. The Taoist sage Chuang Tzu offers advice at the outset of practice: "Can you rest where there is rest? Do you know when to stop? Can you mind your own business... without desiring reports on how others are progressing?... You want the first elements? The infant has them. Free from care, unaware of self, he acts without reflection, stays where he is put, does not know why, does not figure things out, just goes along with them, is part of the current... This enables you to unlearn so that you can be led..." 

Unlearn so that you can be led? We would rebel in our individuality which wants to accrue and acquire talents and abilities and inner riches to further our self-aggrandizement. We desire more and more, increasing amounts -- more courses, more teachings, more gurus, larger numbers, more money, more pleasure, even more pain, certainly more experience. The word more resounds down the annals of time and its object is desire. Could it be that more will detract from some inner riches and itself diminish us interiorly? Caroline Myss: "Since healing is nonnegotiable, acquisitioners find healing a more formidable challenge than people who have a sense of active power." 

We are living in a time when we can choose from a vast array of techniques and teachings for raising consciousness and transforming ourselves. In this century, for the first time, time and space have been bridged through global communications and modern technology so that we can refer to almost any teaching or method that was ever recorded and even, in some cases, through surviving oral tradition.

Throughout the ages, all around the globe, however diverse the basic philosophy appears, wise teachers have offered methods. Today many of them are being revived, not only through access to ancient texts, but also intuitively and creatively re-discovered by contemporary teachers.

It is necessary to practice. It is not enough to have knowledge, or even insight, into our predicament. If we want to change, we must do something. Since the sheer numbers and variety of techniques is so baffling, we must look inwards to our knowledge of ourselves to seek the guidance to choose methods which are right for us. Having chosen, we must throw ourselves fully into the practice. Some practices will last a lifetime, some will be a help for now. If we trust in our wisdom then we will know.

We live in the era of holism. Previously the methods were divided, you entered by one door. The monk had a different practice to the layperson, the fakir a different practice to the monk, the yogi a different practice to the fakir and so on. Today our practices embrace mind, body and spirit: the intellectual and rational, sensational and emotional and divine and cosmic energies are being brought together within us, as part of our evolutionary process.

You are your own therapist. All healing is self-healing. You are a balanced organism in harmony with yourself and the whole of Existence. You have natural and spontaneous healing abilities which were lost in your early conditioning and now simply need to be allowed.

You are not responsible for anyone else's work on themselves. Do not look for knowledge outside yourself, but cultivate insight and understanding inside yourself. 

There are two basic stages to wise practices in inner work: awakening yourself and integrating what you have learnt. 

Awakening begins with curiosity. Learn to maintain your interest and attention, be open to finding out new things about yourself, question, look and persevere in the task of inner discovery, and be prepared to be thorough and loving in your inner work. Use your courage and take risks, become honest about what is going on with you, including sharing when you want to hide from your truth. Take the energy of fear and, rather than overcome it, transform and use it and be responsible for your own energy

Suspend judgment, because awareness takes place solely in non-judgment; endeavor just to be with 'what is' without evaluating yourself or it, and this will lead to inner clarity

Trust your inner wisdom and your process. The most valuable tool you have is the knowledge that you tend naturally towards. Inner health and balance, extreme emotions, reactions and responses, are all inner pathways to your centre.

Stay open in all your energy centers - pelvis, belly, heart, mind and spirit. This reveals the way to real experience so that your lessons become clear to you

Value your imagination; rekindle your innocence and all the natural ways of creativity and healing which you left behind in childhood. Find the way back to yourself in the ways which feel most natural to you - dancing, painting, poetry, music and rhythm, singing, play.

Be light and cultivate humor, because learning to laugh at yourself is an essential tool which distances, familiarizes and re-enchants you with yourself and the world.

Follow your own process and never let anyone override your true sense of yourself. You are your own expert. In your true and deepest wisdom you know what is best for you always. Always listen to your inner guide and find the courage to follow your inner guidance.

Integrating begins with taking time to let new knowledge settle inside you. It must grow into insight and understanding and become a part of you or it will be of no lasting use. Follow up the work you do on yourself and strive to make your insights grow into deep understanding.

Keep a journal to organize your self-awareness in recognition of your process work and to encourage yourself and 'hold' important material.

Let what you are learning dream inside you through meditation, sleeping, daydreaming, drawing with no thought, physical movement and spend some time in silence each day. Bring negativity into consciousness and shine light on the cynic, saboteur, doubter, to diminish despair. 

Finally, start in small ways - don't cause yourself to fail by setting too BIG a challenge.


BLOG entry #123

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Psycho-Spiritual Development: The Fourth Stage’ was first published in 2011.

Love relationships require self-loyalty, relinquishing power and embracing suffering. Early conditioning and formative relationships define us in reactive relationships. All our relationships with others will refer us back to this need until we are ready to do the work of giving acceptance, forgiveness and compassion to ourselves. Where does the path of relationship lead?

Relationships: The Path to Love through Suffering and Surrender

To get us started on the journey of relationship, Oriah Mountain Dreamer introduces us to the essential practice of being loyal principally to ourselves, the practice that will enable and empower us to love ourselves and through that, love another: "I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul... if you can be with failure, yours and mine... I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away." C G Jung takes us a little further, away from control and manipulation, towards surrender: "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other." He goes on to inform us of the necessity of suffering: "Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises. There is no birth of consciousness without pain." 

We emerge out of our early conditioning and formative relationships hidden and protected beneath the character which covers our true self. The deep inner yearning we experience for contact and connection is projected outwards onto the world and the people in it. We are not able to differentiate between ourselves and it, even though our imminent maturity demands our independence and autonomy. We remain dependent and refer outside ourselves for what we should do. We feel lost, but we are not really lost in an outward sense; we have 'lost' or forsaken our true self, and we have forgotten how we did it. It seems our salvation is in defensive/aggressive behavior, ambition, image, worldly and external concerns and, of course, relationship. 

Relationship defines us and whoever we are in relationship with, unknowingly, carries the responsibility for completing and defining us, as a substitute for us making ourselves whole. No one else can do this but we are unaware as yet. We fall into jealousy, rage, uncontrollable passion, guilt, forbidden desire, envy, distrust, blaming, revenge, betrayal - all reflecting the nightmare of our predicament.

My relationships with others tell me about myself. How someone I am in relationship with treats me reflects how I feel I should be treated and how I feel about myself deep down inside. 

Nothing will change until we learn to love ourselves. All our relationships with others will refer us back to this need until we are ready to do the work of giving acceptance, forgiveness and compassion to ourselves. All love between people begins with self-love and from this basis we can straighten out all our other relationships - with our life partner, our peers, our groups, our employers, our parents and with the divine.

The process of relationship reveals the true nature of love through awareness, acceptance and authenticity. First, we become deeply intimate with ourselves by deep inner knowledge of our true nature. Second, we extend our feeling and engagement to another in compassion and empathy. Finally, we experience the other as ourselves, separate but undifferentiated, together and alone, the fruits of relationship grow on the tree of genuine affection.

The path of relationship leads us through self-selection, profound significance and self-consciousness into dawning intimacy. Along the way we encounter fear, need, desire, lack and empowerment; we experience vulnerability and dependence. We work with the dynamics of closeness and distance, personal boundaries and attachment, projections, merging and separateness. To deal with the confusion and bewilderment of all these complex processes we require wise practices, awareness and deep acceptance of self and other.

BLOG entry #122

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Psycho-Spiritual Development: The Third Stage’ was first published in 2011.

Birth and Early Conditioning: Devising a Personal Cosmogony

Two wise men attempt to inspire us to answer profoundly the question which birth and early life implies. First, Rainer Maria Rilke in the Duino Elegies warns us, "Do not think that there is more in destiny than can be packed into childhood." Second, the Indian saint Ramana Maharshi asks, "What is the use of knowing about everything else when you do not yet know Who you are? Self-enquiry is the one infallible means, the only direct one, of realizing the unconditioned, absolute Being you really are." 

Arguable everyone should attend to the life-orientating task of devising a personal cosmogony if they are to avoid the pitfall of acting like sheep.

As we become involved in the field of time so our consciousness becomes attached to things - to events and to characteristics - and is finally enticed and subsumed entirely into the world of form, the energetic level of matter to which the reality of the formless and the limitless is construed as a threat by the small separate self. We cling to our separate identity as if it were a life raft. If we are fortunate it becomes an efficient vehicle in which we journey through life safely - defended and protected. Later, however, it proves less useful as its restrictions and demands take over and we are prevented from embracing the new freedom that lies in our ability to be independent and autonomous beings. 

When we choose to turn the light of awareness back on to ourselves, we begin to realize the enormity of the limitations imposed on us by our characters. As we challenge the assumptions, the deeply-held beliefs and habits it becomes clear that we are protecting the vulnerable child within us who has not been allowed to grow and who is in possession of our deepest truth. Our emotional, physical and spiritual development has been stunted; our abandonment of this child is the abandonment of our authenticity, of who we really are. The emotional opening that occurs when we discover this begins the healing of our deep wound and the grief that follows this discovery opens us to the experience of life in all its richness and mystery. The joy of uniting the two parts of ourselves heals us and we are empowered to go on with integrity and wholeness. Those who have yet to embark on the journey to the self feel an expectancy, a longing because the birth of the self is the true birth - the psychological and spiritual birth - of ourselves. For those who have taken even one foot-step on the path to the self there is already a sense of belonging, of home-coming, of rightness and straightness: you have made a commitment to truth.

Character Patterns and Defense: Waking Up through Transformation

The psychotherapist Ron Kurtz in Hakomi Therapy put it this way: "What truly helps a person to understand and modify his or her character is a search for the way that beliefs, dispositions and habits guide and organize ongoing experience. More important [than memories of traumatic events] are those core beliefs and physiological strengths that evolve into and support particular character strategies." And Martin Buber starkly stated, "All real living is meeting." 

Arguable everyone should look at the self-imposed limitations of their life; the ones that may cause them to look back when it's too late and say, "I missed it!" 

As a result of early experiences we adopt a character strategy which is defensive and designed to protect us and gives us a false sense of security in what we now perceive as a hostile environment (which is modeled on our family life). The character defense which we adopt is unique to us, however typologies may help us to recognize and identify its parts and engage with the essential work (for personal growth) of becoming acquainted with character as something other than ourselves, which opens up a line of enquiry whereby we can begin to be more objective towards ourselves and our lives.

We must discover how these same defense systems are inhibiting our full experience of the world and see how this gives rise to feelings of disconnectedness, dissatisfaction, depression and longing. We need to examine our set beliefs about the world and see how we create our own lives through these restricting beliefs. Emotional patterns and patterns of relationship, which are all restrictive and conditional, emerge as our old habits of acting, thinking and feeling are brought into consciousness. As we clear these patterns and the feelings which give rise to them, we create the conditions for love, compassion, passion and vibrancy in our lives.

Patterns are the link between conditioning and character. We can 'know' our character through its results in our lives - how we live, what we do, how we relate, how we deal with fear, rage and need and next through asking what have we created in our lives and what does this say about our character. Patterns are conditioning in action, expressions in our lives of the tried and the tested - the known, which is associated with an illusory safety.

Although we may desire change in our lives, the cost of real change is always high. We must usually let go of a part of our character and we are mostly identified with character until we have worked sufficiently deeply to see ourselves objectively, with compassion. Only then is change possible and still we may have to cultivate favorable conditions in which change can occur before anything transformative takes place in our lives. Our hold on ourselves and our illusion of power and control in our lives is such that, even when we may think we have let go, we are still holding on. Change is natural and, as we return to our true nature, we harmonize with the natural flow and rhythm of change and it is here that transformation takes place.

BLOG entry #121

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Psycho-Spiritual Development: The First Two Stages’ was first published in 2011.