Question: "How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "One, but the light bulb must really want to change!"

I guess I was a light bulb that really wanted to change, because therapy worked for me. This puts me in mind of a client who recently came to see me and, when I asked him if he had been in therapy before, he replied, "Only for two sessions." Why didn't you continue therapy?" I asked. "To be honest, I thought the therapist needed therapy more than I did," he replied.

Helpers and Sufferers

This is not uncommon. Therapists and other practitioners may take up a practice and pose as helpers to the public while privately offering the very service that they themselves desire; the helper is really the sufferer in disguise.

This is one of the lessons of the last 40 years, but there are many more. When I was writing my book, Human Awakening, I wrote about the need for recognizing the pitfalls, drawbacks, short cuts and cautions of inner work, both psychologically and spirituality. Each time the list became so long, I had to draw back so as not to have the negatives of therapy overwhelm me and my readers. In the end I had to opt for a brief summary.

Therapy and Healing must be Real

Those who seek complementary/alternative healing and therapy treatments may be running on faith, but beneath their innocent hopes, which are sometimes dashed, is an instinctive impulse. This impulse is towards wholeness, either in the integration of personality, an all-inclusive approach to illness or the wise conviction that a connected life is a sane life.

The aspiration of therapy/healing/spirituality is sound; those who seek the benefits of such treatments are essentially sound. But the practitioners, of whom there are now an extraordinary number, require a new paradigm of radical authenticity.

Psychotherapy, healing and spiritual guidance and practice only become effective when they are real. And they become real when the practitioner practices from an authentic, core place. Personal gain, self-aggrandizement, money, status, manipulation, power and control are not issues to be side-stepped, since they are, all of them, pertinent to the practitioner who has any vestige of attachment to personality (i.e. just about all of us).

Rooted in Authenticity

For therapists and healing practitioners to be genuine and deeply rooted in authenticity, they must have come through the inner journey and be accomplished in the practice of truth. Crucially, they must not be attached to the role of psychotherapist, healer, guide or whatever their title is. It's a tall order, but the fruits of successful inner work are great, so a lot can be, and should be, asked of its practitioners. It is not only personally, but also globally, important that therapy, inner work and healing succeed.

Therapy, inner work and alternative/complementary medicine are crucial for the healing and maintaining of the wider world -- the one that objectifies and magnifies hostility, violence, dogma, bigotry, prejudice, power over others, unfair control, intimidation, and terrorization into the collective: the global arena.

Global Consciousness and the Inner World

When you look around you, alongside the creations of nature, you see the results of man's creations. All that you see on this level began inside, originated in the inner world. Out of imagination, wish-fulfillment, aspiration, sometime inspiration, and desire human beings have created the most spectacular and amazing things. What we take for granted today would appear miraculous to us a few years ago.

Not only the miracles of technology, but also the aberrations of war, prejudice callousness and victimization-- the whole sum of inhuman acts from one human being to another, or from one collective of country/nationality, religion, political persuasion, gender to another -- have sprung from the inner world of individuals and collections of individuals.

So, when we consider the practices and personal commitment to becoming acquainted with and to transforming the inner world, we should see it for the momentous act it is. One person who truly engages in the path of self-responsibility has tremendous affect on the global consciousness.

Therapy and inner work: the hope for the future

Psychotherapy, meditation, inner work and personal healing constitute the hope for humanity's future evolution, because the imbalances and disharmonies in an individual human directly reflect into the outside world.

People are basically unhappy in an unhappy world

People are basically unhappy in an unhappy world. In their searching, their restlessness and their dissatisfaction people betray how they really are, how they really feel about their lives, and about their world. Since the location and the source of happiness is inside, only by encouraging people to take personal responsibility for their lives, to take the inner journey or the descent into their deep humanity can we make a real difference.

BLOG entry #95

Today there are many people who are disillusioned by their experience of therapy, healing or spiritual practices. The promises of the alternative and complementary approaches to healing or enlightenment were great in the seventies and eighties. Here at the start of the twenty-first century, 40 years of results deserve a review.

But does anybody really question therapy and healing practices? Today people continue to flock to reflexologists, aromatherapists, NLP practitioners, counselors, et al, presumably convinced that handing over their money and spending an hour or so of their time will lead to some desired result.

What we want

What is the result? Well, I recently saw a film for marketing alternative therapies that attempts to answer this question clearly. What we want -- and notice the 'we' which always makes us (oops!) think we are being subtly, or blatantly, patronized, even though we have learnt to love and accept the sense of belonging and inclusiveness or exclusivity it gives us -- is happiness, health, money or attractiveness (defined as "sexiness"). Relationship difficulties, career, meaning, purpose and that kind of thing don't matter as much apparently, although most therapists would have us believe they do.

With such exalted aims you might think that the welter of self-help books, psycho-spiritual gurus and weird and wonderful methods would have some effect, wouldn't you?

A Variety of Therapies

Well, judging by the variety of approaches, the proliferation of methods and schools and the weighty promises made by them, perhaps not. Because, after all, if these approaches were effective the appetite for fresh approaches would not be so great.

On the other hand, if these ways and methods were ineffective wouldn't the increasing numbers of seekers and customers for healing and self-improvement have dried up by now, or at least be showing signs of decline?

An Impossible Bind?

It is reminiscent of the impossible bind of law enforcement agencies that have to justify applying for a boost in funding, while at the same time proving that they are effective because crime figures are dropping. If crime figures are dropping the police must be doing their job. If crime is rising, then why boost police funding? Alternatively, if crime is dropping, why not reduce police funding? Why increase funding if the police are ineffective?

There is no easy answer. If the healing-spiritual-psychological practitioners were subject to the same scrutiny, what would they say to support their claim that they are delivering an effective service, while yearly more and more people, and often the same people, keep coming back for the same thing?

A Curtain of Secrecy

In fact the alternative/complementary sector has done fairly much what the police do in this near-impossible bind: they play with terms, 'doctor the figures' and create new ways of looking at the problem to convince us of the indispensable services they offer and the illusion that they are delivering the goods. A curtain of secrecy is drawn across the real facts to justify the end.

This curtain includes turning the responsibility back on to the patient, client, student or adept ("if you were truly committed, you would be successful"). In psychotherapy the term used is resistance ("your unconscious is resisting your growth process"). Or there's "if we work a little deeper, we'll find the right remedy for you," or "the healing has begun" to justify alternative often bizarre and inept methods of healing. Of course, there's always the quasi-religious, 'Just have faith and... a bit more faith'.

How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?

These remarks conjure up the spectre of the old seventies therapy joke: Question: "How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "One, but the light bulb must really want to change!" (Ba-bum!)

BLOG entry #94

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. ‘Therapy, Healing and Spirituality: Part 1 – Promises and Disillusionment’ was first published in 2011.

Self-awareness is the principle tool of psychological inquiry. To be free of the limitations of personality and character we must rise to the challenge of being human, to be all we are and all we can be. It is a process of radical insight of which the following is a summary.

First, you identify who you have become or who you have pretended to be. This takes great humility, trust and openness. What you identify yourself with has created a repetitive cycle of events that amount to your life history. Everything goes round and round, everything returns. If you are honest with yourself you see that you suffer in ways that have become habitual, that are very familiar to you. Your cycles are emotional and behavioral, very fixed and mechanical. You can bring no clear thought or awareness to these cycles because the simple act of doing so would result in their dissolution and you would be free of them.

But freedom from your emotional-behavioral cycles means freedom from your identity which has become fixed in your mind. Freedom of this sort sounds like saying let go of the life-raft to a drowning man or jumping out of an airplane with no parachute.

The cycles of anger, sadness, pain and fear that maintain our identity as victim, martyr, abandoned, unloved, ignored, neglected, abused, worthless or lacking are precious defenses. We hide behind them and let no one in. And we suffer within our little castle, longing for contact but depending on separation.

The human personality is like a child's merry-go-round. When the ride finishes we pay again and take another journey. We get nowhere. But if we harness our addiction to the merry-go-round and find the courage to take the first step off it, instead of paying again and again to get away from ourselves, we move outward, drop our identities for something much wiser, more expansive: the vessel of life through which we can cultivate our ability to really live.

Life has missed us - or we have missed it. Running in fear (anxiety, worry, dread), boiling in anger (frustration, resentment, irritation, disgust, depression), screaming inwardly in pain (betrayal, woundedness, abuse), drowning in sadness (grief, anguish, despair, disappointment, melancholy), we have had no time for it; we have rejected life. Yet who has been creating these circumstances? What is the source or cause of our predicament?

It is, of course, ourselves - or rather our attachment to our personal identity which is no more than a suit of clothes, though it has become a prison of our own making.

Look at yourself inwardly as you go about your day. You find that just as unconscious, biological forces regulate your body temperature and your heartbeat, your mind carefully engineers the desired levels of sadness, fear, pain and hate that you require to keep yourself attached to the sense of yourself which you have decided is you.

You are so busy maintaining it, being a dedicated creator of your habitual experience of the world, that it doesn't occur to you that something else is possible - that you may be something other than this tight-fitting suit of identity.

The most powerful tool you have is awareness. The simple practice of becoming aware of yourself leads to an overwhelming acceptance of the parts of you which you like and the parts of you which you don't like. You begin to embrace not only your out-going personality (the person you pretend to be) but also the darker, shadow aspects of yourself, which crave but never receive acceptance. The meeting of your outward personality with your inward shadow comprises you in your wholeness. Passing through guilt and shame, grief and anguish, you emerge as a whole human being.

When you have crossed this threshold of transformation, you are faced with a great challenge: to be authentic, real and true. While you practice and deepen in understanding, pretense, defensiveness and fear start to recede. At last you have embraced the great challenge of being human.

BLOG entry #93

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. ‘Self-Awareness: A Summary of the Process of Becoming Authentic’ was first published in 2011.

Q: How does one begin to practice psycho-spiritually?

R: In the same way as one begins on any spiritual path, in the dual states of doubt and faith from where you question everything, and adopt the assumption that the world you see is not the world as it is, but merely the objective world of one's inner life projected outwards as one's own interpretation of the world. When you give up description, opinion and understanding, and realize that you don't have to assume a position relative to other the insight dawns within you that you are not separate from anything else.

Q: But if you are not separate to anything else, how would you live?

R: In congruence and truth, out of the central heart of compassion for all living forms that arise in consciousness. You see the world is not as we see it; it really is quite different from our relative, materialistic, phenomenal way of seeing it.

Q: So when we see it like this are we happy?

R: Yes, but not in the way that you think of happiness from the relative standpoint, which is happiness balanced, or contrasted, with unhappiness, misery, depression and so on. This is a happiness which is not dependent on outward circumstances.

Q: So it's not associated with satisfaction or fulfilment of desires?

R: Happiness is an attitude, a way of approaching the world and meeting events knowing that everything fundamentally is as it should be. Suffering is essentially of two varieties -- conscious and unconscious. In unconscious suffering we don't realize that our attachment to circumstances, positive or negative, is the fundamental cause of suffering. We perpetuate suffering by remaining attached to conditions, and these conditions will change -- must change inevitably -- because that is the nature of life; change is intrinsic to life and we are powerless to change that. But if we can embrace suffering and see that it is the means to our personal liberation, we take the 'sting' out of it and meet it happily. Whatever happens, we are fundamentally in touch with our true self and that true self exists within a fundamentally happy condition.

Q: Might this happiness be thought of as the goal of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy?

R: Maybe, but ultimately there should be no goal aside from to be as you are...

Q:...and then you'll see the world as it is.

R: Yes, exactly! You will see the world as it is.

BLOG entry #92

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. ‘Therapy Meets Spirituality: A Psycho-Spiritual Discussion – Part 3: Seeing The World As It Is’ was first published in 2011.

Q: When you experience yourself in your true nature does that entail withdrawal from the world?

R: It may do. I think it important to remember that not all self-realized beings are engaged in teaching, or necessarily courting any kind of public profile whatsoever. Nonetheless to have attained the divine condition is itself a service to the whole of humanity. But for the spiritually-minded adept or student today it is increasingly self-evident that spirituality, or the quest for the divine, may be quietly and consistently followed while leading a secular existence, which means involving yourself in roles and functions that are ordinary and basically human. The way of paradox leads past itself to the insight that everything is ultimately divine -- everything, without exception.

Q: But what about ignorance, evil, wrong-doing and so on?

R: It all depends on how and from where you are looking at it. If you can see that everything is tending towards good -- and not good in the sense of good and evil, but goodness in the sense of absolute goodness -- then that is an entirely different view from, for example, a moral position or an ethical standpoint, which is loaded with a value system filled with assumptions and emotional filters. Rather practice awareness, acceptance and deepen in understanding out of expanded consciousness in relation to the world about you.

Q: Can I throw a few concepts and one-offs at you for a quick reply?

R: Go ahead!

Q: Spiritual pride?

R: A contradiction in terms. When spiritual life is realized in the practitioner, there is no one to feel proud.

Q: Well, what about spiritual experience then?

R: Strictly speaking, no, you can't have it, because when transcendence is present, you are not. This is the meaning of the Mahavakya inthe ancient Upanishads which expresses the unity of the Universal and the individual as "I AM THAT".

Q: Gnana yoga?

R: The penultimate spiritual practice that leads to complete renunciation of the world; the method of using the mind against itself until, with the cessation of mental activity, the truth appears starkly on a pristine background.

Q: Humanistic psychology, before the introduction of the transpersonal?

R: Humanistic psychology gave us back our sense of individual responsibility for our lives, deepened our understanding of the inner world and psychological states, provided a new paradigm for inner exploration and demonstrated incontrovertibly that psyche is mind, which is to say that the unconscious arises in form.

Q: And Transpersonal psychology?

R: From the beginnings with Jung, William James and Maslow to the present day Transpersonal psychology has been both a hollow, unfulfilled promise of transcendence, one of the greatest missed opportunities of the past 100 years, but it has also provided a gateway, the beginning of a sophisticated, informed spiritual approach for the western mind that specifically addresses the crucial need for a spiritual approach to personality in the age of individualism.

Q: Buddhism?

R: I prefer the Buddha's original teachings, which were wordless -- even before the famous Flower Sermon. The Buddha originally, after his enlightenment at the bodhi tree, realizes that he cannot convey what he has discovered through words, but only in mouna, or silence.

R: And Christianity...

R:... teaches the way of authenticity in the world, how we may live in the only way that manifests full intelligence -- through kindness, compassion and love... and that's a tall order as the Gospels show, but it is the expression of our authentic self, our true nature.

BLOG entry #91

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. ‘Therapy Meets Spirituality: A Psycho-Spiritual Discussion – Part 2: Your True Nature’ was first published in 2011.