Does therapy really help people to change or is it only a placebo, a substitute relationship, providing comfort for those who are unable to form relationships on an equal basis in the outer world?

Therapy can enable and empower people to change. But we must be aware that there are many pitfalls, echoes of illusion and delusion and many seductions on the inner journey. So we must be sure that change is change and not merely imagined.

So, how can we be sure? The first rule is you cannot do it by yourself. You must have someone you trust -- a therapist or a counselor -- who acts as a guide and who you allow to know you in an authentic way. Your therapist must become familiar with your quirks and particularly the ways in which you avoid difficulties, hide secrets, sabotage your own growth and positive or negative attributes. Essentially the therapist must know who you are beneath your character.

How is a therapist able to do that when we might not know who we are underneath our character ourselves? Character is communicated in various ways, just as the essential self is expressed in a variety of ways. It is the job of the therapist to "listen" in a whole body, psychic, intuitive, instinctive, and extremely sensitive and considerate way to the client. The client may have no idea of what is being communicated to the therapist unconsciously.

Some people have tried to change through therapy and counseling and become disillusioned. The practice of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy by a competent practitioner is the specialized, focused approach for people to achieve lasting, personal change and transformation. There is a vast body of knowledge, philosophy, research, and, of course, psychology which supports the practice of psychotherapy. Although clearly some practitioners are more competent than others for a variety of reasons and though sometimes a person may wish for change while being unaware that another part of themselves is resisting change, and winning, we can no more throw the baby out with the bathwater in the therapy field than we should throw the toolbox away simply because some of us don't know how to use it.

But therapy that proffers hope is not really enough for someone who wants change and is motivated to succeed, or who is depressed and seeking a way out, or suicidal and desperately seeking an answer to their angst. The first aspect of therapy we should understand is that therapy is not a commodity. You don't buy it like you go to the chemists, the grocers or the 7-Eleven. It is essentially a relationship and it is the relationship that makes it work.

The second aspect of therapy that we need to understand is that it is crucial to maintain focus. The therapist should keep you on your path and the client needs to be able to discern the relevant material and be prepared to work on it.

The relationship is crucial, because it is in early, formative relationships that we have become protected and defended. Through our relationship to the world we have learned to hide ourselves and restrict our creativity, joy and pleasure in life, as well as the realization of our potential. It follows that a healthy relationship, one that is supportive and nurturing, expansive and challenging, is the way forward to change and personal transformation. The therapy journey is a process that unfolds over time. With the right guidance, quality of relationship and mutual respect for the inner journey, transformation is possible, and indeed probable.

BLOG entry #105

It is the potential of every person to grow into a whole human being. The great challenge of a human life is to discover all that is within the human heart.

The Bridge of Authenticity

My work bridges personal therapy and inner work with spiritual growth.

Personal exploration is qualitatively different from spiritual development: the former requires self-absorption, the latter requires self surrender. In the first we discover ourselves, in the second we liberate ourselves.

The difference has confused many seekers. To my knowledge no one has clearly explained how these two processes are really one single connected process.

We can pass from one to the other through the bridge of authenticity, a bridge that we cross when we experience personal transformation.

In personal work we change, but authenticity is only reached through transformation. This is the ultimate goal of personal inner work. On the spiritual level our attainment is surrendered in service to our divine nature.

The Modern Mystic Path

Today the secrets are known, so there is no mystery about the modern mystic path. But merely knowing the secret does not reflect our need to live it and to follow the path. The essential secret is that we are consciousness and consciousness is eternal. Freedom from separation and attachments involves living into this secret until it becomes our central reality… beyond fear and desire.

My life-long search has been to realize this freedom. My enduring work with others has been to share what I have found openly and accessibly, to guide others on the inner journey, and to enable and empower them to awaken to consciousness and realize their true nature.

The Three Levels of Awakening

There are three levels of awakening—personal, authentic and spiritual. I call these three levels:

1. The Process of Self-Discovery

2. The Transformation into Authenticity

3. The Source of Consciousness

They form the foundation of my work.

1.      The Process of Self-Discovery

Our small sense of self, which we experience as character, is a reflection of our deeper self. But when we become attached to the small self we deny ourselves freedom. We partly do this through clinging to the small sense of self and living in a prison of emotional and behavioral patterns which effectively have us going round in circles without any memory that we have repeated life experiences which are dictated by our conditioning. To conceal this from ourselves we use our character as a defense. Our character has to be brought consistently to awareness until it becomes transparent to us and we understand it for what it is, live with it in a positive way and become empowered to make new choices. This is the work of personal therapy and the aim is to resolve the unfinished business of our early life experiences.

2.      The Transformation into Authenticity

When we have recognized and shed our attachment to our small sense of self, we are faced with the fact that, since we are not our character, we don’t really know who we are. There follows a great adventure in authenticity. We confront our fears and desires in a radical way and ask, “If I am not willing to be who I really am, then what is the meaning of my life?” Thus we cross a threshold of truth and sincerity to fundamental change. No longer are we driven by the compulsions of our habitual emotional and behavioral drives and living in a prison of our own making. We become genuine, real and our relationships to life and to others are transformed by this new understanding. This is the work of depth psychotherapy and the aim is to become self-responsible and authentic.

3.      The Source of Consciousness

The true Self is the state of perfect freedom in which we transcend the human conditions of fear and desire. We reach a deep understanding of the body-mind and soul as incarnate spirit and practice living out of emptiness and not-knowing. This is how we learn to truly be, beyond separation and attachment. It is the state of non-ordinary ordinariness, wisdom and unity. It is experienced by many temporarily but it requires great courage and determination to remain in it.

This is the work of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy and the aim is to live in the present moment beyond memory of the past or fear of the future, centered in the spiritual realms beyond the personal, being entirely natural and living from our true nature.

BLOG entry #104

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. ‘The Inner Journey to Human Awakening: The Great Challenge of A Human Life’ was first published in 2011.

People suffering from depression or despair have an acute need for therapy and counselling. How can therapy meet those needs, particularly when it is less a commodity and more a relationship? What does this mean exactly?

Therapy won't do it for you; it won't solve your problems, provide a cure or administer a corrective or medicine-like dose to change your state of mind or the conditions of your life. From short-term counselling, or symptomatic counselling, to depth or major psychotherapy, which takes place over many years, as well as all stages in between, this is the case. The client, or patient, cannot just appear and put time into therapy; they are required to participate in a real, motivated way with purpose, application and persistence. This is not a simple matter, because we are human beings with a mix of conflicts, sub-personalities, voices disagreeing and modifying other voices and different points of view; we are a melee, an Hieronymus Bosch picture of what the Buddha called suffering.

In the middle of all of these conflicting forces, the client has really got to want to change. One of the stock answers in the psychotherapy field when change does not occur is resistance. But it is rather simplistic, patronizing and belittling to offer up resistance as the great sine qua non of the therapeutic endeavor and aspiration, because it represents the obstacles or blocks without which therapy has nothing to work with. We need to have respect when an individual makes a choice, from whatever level of their consciousness, to persist in the emotional-behavioral patterns they have learnt as adaptation for survival.

It is always a matter of choice. Consciously or unconsciously, we are choosing all the time and that is one of the essential insights for effective therapy work. After all, if we weren't responsible ultimately for what's going on in our lives then we wouldn't be able to change. Since we are ultimately responsible we can do something about it through therapy, self-discovery and awareness practices.

And this requires our conscious cooperation, because therapy does not provide a cure, like medication may claim to for instance, or exert an active force on us, the passive recipients of therapeutic healing. Rather we have to participate and do at least as much as the practitioner we are consulting. As clients we may have to do more. It's a joint practice.

The Buddha spoke of suffering. Is this a good way in to explaining the "spiritual" in psycho-spiritual? Why, for example, should an atheist or a person without any practicing faith come to see a psycho-spiritual therapist? Is it necessary to be on a spiritual quest of some kind or might the client might be moved to practice spiritually as a result of therapy?

Everyone who is living and breathing has some experience, some sense, of something that is dear to them, which they prize and honor, something they revere or respect, someone they love and perhaps a person or a cause they would give their life for. Therefore everyone has some idea of the spiritual, that which is beyond the common sense of self as a self-serving entity engaged in survival and personal pleasure. The psychologist Jung went a step further and claimed from examining a huge number of dreams from different times, cultures and moralities and value systems, that humankind share a collective unconscious that is inherited and expressed in commonly recurring symbols and archetypes.

Everyone has a spiritual side, although they may call it by a variety of names; everyone values something or someone above themselves, even if it's science, philosophy, the state of the world or ecology. But today we may well ask, "Isn't science the new religion?"

The usurping of religion by science is the result of a pointless desperate conflict, in which human beings try to discover the "right" answer without any regard for the variety and the multi-layering of reality and their composite experience. For example, science cannot say very much about what is intuitive and instinctive, let alone what is numinous and in a completely different realm to the kinds of phenomena that science seeks to observe and measure. The spiritual, the transcendent and the divine are beyond words and experience. It is pointless to try to convince someone who is scientifically minded of the truth of spiritual, numinous events, just as it is futile to try to convince a spiritually-minded person of the absolute truth of science.

What happens when a scientist comes to you for therapy? Do they see another side to life? The pursuit of the inner realms, the experience of inner processes and the understanding of inner objects and their significance may be interpreted in any number of ways that are personal to the experiencer, to the client. Many a numinous experience has been minimalized and reduced to an emotional or instinctive, neurological event by the scientifically minded client. But we are all different, which is one of the wonders of being human; the differences, the variety, the uniqueness and the individual contribution each person makes to the whole.

Spiritually everyone one of us has an individual, unique contribution to make to the whole. But alongside this assertion is the idea that the end of spiritual attainment is to share in a common essence, which is sometimes called unity consciousness. One characteristic of religious cults is that everyone starts dressing, behaving and even thinking the same. So where are the individual's unique human qualities in that?

Religious or spiritual cults have led to a sheep mentality. As in all walks of life and all pursuits, you have a very few people who remain questioning and non-conformist enough -- free of the schizoid tendencies to feel insecure about belonging and fitting in -- to withstand the collective power of the status quo, even when it is intensely weird, inhumane and corrupt. But everything that takes place in the name of spirituality is not necessarily any more spiritual than a political rally, a football supporters' meeting, or even a drunken night out. All these pursuits invite and insist on a certain relinquishing of one's individuality and embracing the ethos of the collective.

But in psycho-spiritual therapy work resolving childhood needs and desires are a primary concern. We work first with the unfinished business of personality, because only when the ego is fully formed and healthy do you have anything to surrender to the spiritual fire. The fulfillment of the ego is found in the ego's surrender or relinquishing, because you are much more than the ego allows you to be. So this is a radical transformation that is achieved by locating yourself in your true center.

A person is more than their ego. This is apparent in quite ordinary acts of loving and sacrifice, even pleasure. But transcending the ego is a tall order for most people. In the pursuit of spirituality in the modern world it is important to remember that the early and deeply profound teachings of ancient spirituality did not have to deal with the central issue we have today and that is individualism. The modern world (and I don't think we have to say western, as if it's different from eastern; western and eastern dichotomies have always been confusing because the divide is more cultural and political than geographical) has progressively centralized the individual, so we have an attack of the ego forces nonpareil. No time in the past has ever had to face this issue and certainly not 3000 years ago in the Indus valley for example when your caste and station in life was very set and, unless you were aristocratic or of the priest class, you were involved in subsistence, in survival.

Today we have leisure, recreation, choice -- even spirituality has become a tourist industry!

So we have to look at what the individual means in terms of spirituality. The spiritual path in the modern world is individual in nature and approach. First, this is obvious because you notice that people pic'n'mix their spiritual philosophy and methodology. This has its own difficulties; you follow Buddhism until you come across something you don't like, then you bail out into Sufism or Taoism, until you find something you don't like there and throw in a little mystical Christianity and some Course in Miracles. The obvious difficulty is that you cannot dictate your spiritual practice based on your personal preferences, for the simple reason that spiritual practice should challenge your personality at every turn, so if your personality is in the driving seat you are really not going to get anywhere.

Today we are saturated with spiritual wisdom and guidance, so comparing paths is unavoidable. Even the great Thomas Merton [controversial monk and Catholic mystic] was considering defecting to Zen in the last years before he died. But as Joseph Campbell remarked when he was asked if you have to let go of your religion to attain spiritual goals; no, you have to go the whole way to where the religion at its source represents the truth of the spiritual journey to awakening and liberation.

Individuality cannot be sidestepped. We must have a spiritual practice and methodology that embraces the individual and works with that, not by ignoring but by seeing how it can assist the venture of enlightenment. The ego is not just a fiction to be discarded, as if a few years of meditation will put paid to it. The ego must be understood and first put into service to the higher faculties of human existence.

BLOG entry #102

You don't become spiritual. Spirituality is your natural condition. You are already, regardless of whether you like it or not, whether you are religious or not, whether you are inclined towards spiritual practices like meditation or contemplation or not - spiritual. It is a word which describes your inner self, your essence, that essential part of you which is deeper, more profound and more original than any other part of you. It is closest of all to your source, the origins of your existence and the place from where life in you springs.

To understand life, the role of human beings and other life forms, events and circumstances we see in life, humankind has thought, depicted, drawn and painted, and created rituals and ceremonies, sung, played and composed music and countless elaborations of movement since the beginning of recorded time. In fact most or even all of the things we take for granted, like music, movies, movement and dance, wine, food, arts and crafts, singing, parties and ceremonies, rites of passage (like baby's naming, coming of age, weddings and funerals) have their origins firmly in pagan, primitive humankind's attempts to make sense and to honor life in a way that connected them to supra-human forces, such as the weather, the fructification of the crops, the success of the hunt, the longevity of human life, the survival of the tribe, the bonding of the relationships and the families in the tribe, the continued flourishing of life in the community: Not much has changed, because we mostly share the same kinds of concerns today.

Spirituality is all this, plus arguably everything we do, say, argue about and think. The ways in which we interact, love, fight, engage in our human roles, look after ourselves and each other, is in essence spiritual. It is who we are.

So, becoming spiritual really means becoming who you are. This rather assumes that you are not already who you are. And in a way it's true. Not so much that you are not who you are, but that you are not yet all that you are. Life is an adventure of arriving or sometimes it is called growing up or maturing. We develop through stages of challenge, expectation and personal growth to become, or finally arrive, at a true foundation based on the reality, the truth about who we are.

An appropriate analogy is the flower. A flower begins as a seed germinating in the ground. Reaching upwards towards its intuition of the light source the seed grows a stem and finally penetrates and pushes through the surface of the earth. Once established above ground, the growing stem of the flower is wholly dependent on nourishment, not only from its roots, but also from light from the sun. It develops leaves and buds. In time the bud opens and reveals the true flower.

Becoming spiritual, becoming who you are, is vitally important. For everyone. The differences between people are never clearer than in those who take this seriously and in those who don't. Taking our essence, our spirituality, seriously means that we know we don't have all the time in the world, we know that we are not omnipotent, that we will not always be here, that we are just passing through and we know that we are here for a reason. The ones who do not take it seriously act like they have all the time in the world, like they will never die, will never have to face the important questions, predicaments and decisions of life; they are complacent and underneath it they are afraid.

The authentic spiritual life is the way beyond fear, because it is the path to truth and reality. It is the way to what is eternal.

How do you become spiritual?

Start with a little discipline. Feel the world, cultivate awareness, keep your eyes open wide and your heart open wider, allow yourself to be affected by the world, touched by people and events, be present and breathe - that is a good start.

BLOG entry #101

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. ‘How Do You Become Spiritual?’ was first published in 2011.