Richard Harvey answers questions about the threefold model of human awakening.

You speak of a threefold model of human awakening through deepening levels of awareness. The first level is what we usually think of as personal therapy, the second is a personal transformation that leads to authenticity, and the third is the realization of the true Self. Could you clearly summarize the relationship between personal therapy, personal authenticity and Self-Realization?

Deep inner change leads to personal transformation and spiritual awakening. It begins with personal therapy. Personal therapy may be an end in itself or a prelude for the life of authenticity, genuine relationship and engagement with others and the world. Personal therapy is connected to spiritual growth through this middle stage, which I call the transformation into authenticity.

Personal therapy can be completed. In the process of inner work there is a point where you feel a sense of completion or personal wholeness. This is the condition of embracing your so-called shadow side, which comprises all that you have denied or repressed, and stored in your deep unconscious. When you live with an acceptance of the shadow alongside your acceptance of your conscious self, you have embraced your whole self. This sense of completion is like a journey around the self. You have realized the wholeness of your personality and found the edges of your egoic limits.

So, beyond the usual parameters of personal therapy, a permanent transformation may come about, which is the flowering of inner work. This is the authentic self. Personal authenticity prepares the way for awakening by connecting us to the source of life or consciousness.

So, to summarize, in personal therapy you begin with the practice of awareness which leads to self-discovery and change, where you reach the edges of the personality, the conditioning from your early life and your small sense of self.

In the second stage you can choose to cross a psychological threshold—it is a kind of death, but it is also the birth of the psyche or soul into the world and it represents an irreversible transformation of the self into authenticity.

In the third stage the true Self awakens, but it has always been here in consciousness as a reflection of the Absolute and you journey past the world of duality, the opposites, and division and separation in which the individual personality is dissolved. This is human awakening. It’s like waking up into a place you have been asleep in or unaware of or oblivious to. This is why the journey of personal and spiritual growth, when you see it through, brings you to a place of great joy, a mood of tremendous elation.

This is expressed in the idea of rapture, ecstasy or bliss—or satchitananda in the Hindu tradition. After all you have been through, all the tests and ordeals, all the suffering and trials, the struggle, confusion and angst, the end of the road is finally realizing that there is no journey to the present moment: no way or path is necessary to where we already are! Your whole dualistic way of thinking prescribed your experience for you: it was never really like that at all!

So, first we discover ourselves, then we transform into authenticity and, finally, we awaken?

The order of awakening is awareness, transformation, realization. Today we are having a hard time meeting the first of these—awareness. Because it seems increasingly hard in a relatively superficial, increasingly amoral, fickle and speed-driven culture to recognize, honor or even value such things as these. After all they are essentially invisible and practicing them doesn’t necessarily give you status in a materialistic world where prestige, acquisition and conformity are prized so highly.

But when we awaken aren’t we simply conforming too—albeit to another set of values?

No. Awakening is the full flowering of the self. Transcendence is expressed in individual form, even the ego is surrendered in service to the All. The way it is done is impersonal, but the expression is intensely personal.

What about fear and desire? How do they fit into this?

The twin states of fear and desire dominate human existence. When we succumb to them they limit our potential for growth and discovery. To guide us beyond both is the role of the psycho-spiritual therapist.

Fear is founded on our self-contraction, on our projection of a death-dealing force outside ourselves. Desire is rooted in our belief in lack, that something outside ourselves is required to make us whole and complete. Developing courage, resilience and applying ourselves to true ‘unfolding’, we see through the lies of fear and desire and grow into our true potential and beyond our exclusive identity with our self.

Would you say something about self-identity and the troubled state of the world today, because it seems to me that the two are somehow connected?

Essentially we do not know who we are. Thoughts, fantasy and unreality form a false self. We do not know how to act in relationship to one another and to the world. When being is not connected with doing, others become merely screens for our projections of inner states; thoughts, feelings, judgments and reactions.

The condition of the world is a broader canvas that we create in our own image by projecting and manifesting onto it our fears and anger. We feel disconnected from the source of life; we are educated by parents, teachers, politicians and other authority figures to not see, speak or honor deep truth and matters of soul and spirit. Love, compassion, wisdom, enlightenment become misunderstood, misrepresented or simply avoided altogether.

Today, in the affluent West, our concerns are many and diverse. We are obsessed and distracted by fantasies of happiness and fulfillment, anxious about physical and mental health, illness and ageing. We dream about money and wealth, loving relationships and how to be better human beings. We desire and long for the house, home and lifestyle we want. We are ambitious and seek our self worth in our work and careers. We are confused about how to deal with strong emotions like depression, anxiety, anger and grief. We wrestle with inner conflicts and many suffer from a sense of meaninglessness or lack of purpose. Others are troubled at their lack of creativity and passion. Some struggle with personal development and spiritual hunger.

And how do you think we should deal with surfeit of hardships and difficulties?

We need to truly relate to ourselves, others and the world with clarity, compassion and wisdom, by centering in our heart and seeking a new way of being, doing, working and relating, and by illuminating our inner world through the practices of awareness and wise reflection.

But how can we do this? How do we attain these levels of inner and outer practices?

We can attain all this through taking ourselves seriously and embarking on the inner journey to wholeness and by realizing our true nature through inner work.

And inner work is the practice of therapy and spiritual growth?

In my terms, yes.

BLOG entry #80

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. ‘Interview: Richard Harvey on The Three Stages of Awakening’ was first published in 2010.

Richard Harvey answers questions about group work and group therapy on workshops and courses.

How does group therapy differ from individual therapy?

Well, there are more people involved! The dynamics of group work are powerful in many ways. First, issues can be stimulated that may otherwise take time to surface in individual therapy, without the catalyst of some group interaction, or a certain individual or exchange in the group. A look, a remark, someone you like or dislike may be enough to re-stimulate repressed inner issues.

The group also provides emotional support and encouragement; you get the feeling that you are not the only one grappling with inner work and its challenges. You can see that your struggles are shared by others and you learn from each other’s experiences and share in each other’s successes. The group intensifies relationships. You go very far comparatively quickly, because of the nature of sharing deeply. People become close in a short time.

So which is better, group therapy or individual therapy?

Workshops provide a very good introduction to therapy. And individual therapy can be tremendously enhanced by group therapy. But group therapy is not for everyone. Some people are private about their inner work, some feel intimidated about openly sharing their issues, or feel possessive about their relationship to their therapists when he or she is the group leader.

The public revelation doesn’t always serve the individual process, which is profoundly intimate and private for many people. It is a matter for sensitive discussion between the therapist and the client. Sometimes it is an issue of timing, of knowing when the challenge is going to enhance your inner development.

What is the difference between your workshops and your seminars?

Workshops involve more experiential work and seminars are geared to teaching. In my workshops I am concerned with meeting people where they are and addressing their needs as individuals in a collective, mutually helpful process, while in my seminars I am concerned with encouraging a deep, living understanding of the subject matter

What do you mean by “living understanding”?

Understanding usually means ‘intellectual understanding’ or accruing knowledge. With the material we address in my seminars we are speaking about how it is to be human: what it means, how we experience it, what deepening layers of truth we can reach, what is our true potential, that kind of thing. The discussion of these matters requires wisdom and insight that is ‘felt’ deep within us. Knowledge is not wisdom. So we strive for living understanding, a wisdom that is alive and vibrant and points the way to expansive enquiry into life and our true nature as human beings.

And “living understanding” in relationship to group work therapy?

Sometimes such understanding is not the common understanding of how things are or how life works. The group provides acknowledgement and a testing ground for new insights. With a group of likeminded souls you can stretch out, expand in imagination and vision, and risk thinking in new conceptual frameworks. All of this is integrally connected to change and transformation.

Is there anything else you want to say about working in groups?

The depth and breadth of emotional experience in groups is hard to compare to any other. In friendships, relationships, intimacies of all kinds we so often have an investment in the relationship being a certain way, stable and firm, so we defend and maintain it and ourselves in ways that so often become limiting. In groups the relationship is subordinate to our desire to grow and change. So relationships can be uncertain because everything may be risked.

The privilege of being allowed into someone's life in such an intimate way, to glimpse how they live, what they feel, what really matters to them and how their lives take shape around their core concerns, beliefs and passions is precious and irreplaceable.

In times of great peril or unusual stress people may come together and benefit from similar insights, immediate closeness and emotional connection. This happens to people enduring incarceration or inhuman treatment together; it happened in the two World Wars and in the aftermath of 9/11.

Today, for most of us (in the advantaged “first world”), such perilous intensity is unlikely to happen, because the circumstances of life are relatively comfortable and easy; a lot of us have got enough, financially, creatively, and leisure wise. It is an opulent time for many, some of us have even got too much!

But in groups and workshops I experience something of that intensity and edge of risk and fear. Today the edge of initiation and hazard are internal, not external, and groups are where we meet this edge, through exploring anxiety, dreams, fears and desires, unresolved childhood. The parallel is justified, I think: witnessing people’s work in groups sometimes recalls terrible injustices, torture of the soul, and distress, as well as spontaneous rushes of pleasure, outbreaks of joy and warmth, tenderness and intimacy. In group workshops we encounter the agony and ecstasy of life.

BLOG entry #79

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. ‘Interview: Richard Harvey on Group Work and Group Therapy’ was first published in 2010.

Richard Harvey answers questions about therapy and counseling.

Do people today need therapy more than ever?

Well, I would never presume that people “need” therapy. I would say people benefit from it. I would encourage people to try it and I would hope that in the future therapy, probably under a different name and with a different, new rationale, would be the norm. But if you mean that the world seems full of emotional, behavioral difficulties, issues around unfulfillment, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, frustration and anger, I would have to agree with you, it does look as is therapy is more than ever relevant today.

But today a lot of people are in therapy or counseling of one type or another and it doesn’t seem to have changed the world for the better, does it?

Over the years, in my practice I have noticed how people achieve insights and understanding, have breakthroughs and therapeutic successes, which used to take much longer when I was doing my own personal therapy. This gives me hope in an accelerative evolutionary impulse that is moving us forward faster and more powerfully than before. For example, I have had great success in turning around deeply negative states, like chronic depression, suicidal tendencies and lack of self-esteem, or deeply held behavior such as personal disempowerment, domestic abuse and chronic manipulation.

When therapy achieves successes like these, the world does change for the people directly involved, and it also changes for the people who are involved with them—their spouses, their families and their circle of friends. Therapy in a quiet way is having far-reaching positive influence on the world when you consider this. For every one person who chooses to follow their inner process with a therapist, the potential is that dozens, scores, even hundreds of people will be affected positively by their efforts in all sorts of ways.

Change always takes longer than we want it to. But I believe it is coming about in the bigger picture and I know it is for individuals I work with. As more people liberate themselves and choose to live consciously the community—tlocal, national, international, global—twill change. This is my conviction.

Therapy’s critics often censure the growth movement and the New Age for being solely concerned with oneself and the inner world and ignoring politics, ecology and the present world crisis. What would you say in answer to those criticisms and how can therapy help the world?

As the new therapies that were introduced to us by the growth movement in the 1970s have developed, they have parted company with outer concerns, at least to some degree. In the beginning, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, transpersonal psychology et al were seamlessly connected to outward concerns. Red therapy, the women’s movement, the lesser publicized men’s movement were all influenced by humanistic psychology and enlightened therapeutic methods.

Through the eighties, which was a very materialistic time, accreditation and formalization became paramount as the new therapies attempted to become recognized and legitimated, which was a mixed bag. Some of the cutting edge of therapy was blunted with the emphasis on accountability and transparency, because therapists took fewer risks.

Therapy inevitably became more narrow and specialized and focused on what it could be seen to be competent about, which were inner concerns. So, the marriage of inner and outer was somewhat forsaken.

Today, it may well be true that the personal growth industry caters to the desire for individual fulfillment, but the conviction of many, including myself, is that personal clarity, wisdom and maturity are synonymous with outward change. In other words, the world requires nothing less than a psycho-spiritual revolution to enable humanity to reach a truly moral, compassionate stance.

Inner work, therapy, meditation, whatever we call it or whatever method is adopted, is the hope for the future of the world, because people living according to the restraints of their prejudice out of a narrow, limited view of existence can never question the status quo or challenge the entrenched ways of power and fear while they are subject to those negative forces in their inner life.

We can parallel the constraints of human relationships with the relationship we have to our world and one another. In interpersonal relationships we can only ever love another as much as we can love ourselves and similarly we treat the world in the same way as we treat ourselves, which is not very well! So change that and everything changes.

Finally, therapy is sometimes called the “talking cure”, which seems cerebral and analytical. What is the place of the body, our physicality, in therapy?

Our bodies are the gross manifestations of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, intuitions and so on—the sum total of the inner world in manifest form. So the body is psyche and this is very fortunate because it gives us a direct way of working with the invisible inner world. Therapy may well be a lot of talk sometimes, although it isn’t always. But even when it is, we are paying attention to the body. Breathing, facial expressions, body language and physical posture all give us clues, answers, reactions and responses to what’s being spoken about.

“Body work”, which was a mainstay of the Human Potential Movement when a whole new approach to therapy emerged, is not necessarily making physical contact with the body or even accessing feelings or emotions through the physical body: it can be much more subtle. Noticing, being sensitive and aware we can discover many things that are hidden from us in “normal” conscious life.

BLOG entry #78

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. ‘Interview on Counseling and Psychotherapy’ was first published in 2010.

Richard Harvey answers questions about relationship problems and couples counseling.

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof…”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

What is an intimate relationship?

An intimate relationship—partnership or marriage—is one of the most potent catalysts for wholeness and authenticity there is. Relationships can also be the most deathly and least life-enhancing environment for the human spirit. It all depends on honest and open communication, deepening and growing in intimacy, and the courage and willingness to venture into unknown territory together.

What is the fundamental reason that falling in love and love relationships leads to difficulties?

Love relationships have the power to re-stimulate the unresolved issues of our early childhoods, because when we are in love we are at our most open and vulnerable. Since most of us didn't get all we needed or wanted in our early lives, these same needs and desires arise in our relationships and are often expressed inappropriately.

We may have the unrealistic expectation that our partner can fulfill all our needs. We may idealize our partner who can then only fall from grace and disappoint us. We will never find a partner who meets all our historical desires because these desires belong to the past: they are part of our frozen history.

Relationships compel us to face ourselves and give us the chance to resolve the unfinished business of childhood, because they re-open the issues of dependence, nurture and care.

What are the aims of relationship counseling?

Well, there are several possible aims. The basic level is where the couple are having relationship difficulties and they want to get over a “rocky patch”. Examples would be excessive arguing; taking unilateral decisions like when one partner wants to pursue a career, move house or have children and the other doesn't agree; some kind of power imbalance, perhaps about how decisions are made; disagreements about how to raise the children; one partner wanting to socialize more than the other—that kind of thing.

The next level is about break up. Perhaps their mutual attraction has become lop-sided and one partner wants to move on out of boredom or incompatibility; or one partner may have entered a new stage of life and have fresh expectations of the relationship; or one partner is having an affair or has turned a corner in life and realized that they have outgrown their partner and their relationship. Usually the dynamics of breaking up involve some kind of polarization: one partner is for and the other is against the relationship continuing.

Do couples who come to you for therapy to deal with “break up” issues, always break up?

No. Sometimes there is a turn around: as the couple dig deeper into the things that are causing the difficulties in their relationship they rediscover the hidden lost love they have for each other. Then they can make their relationship work.

And when they go ahead and break up…?

We deal with it as thoroughly as we can. Chances are that, due to relationship and emotional/behavioral patterns, each partner will go off and repeat the same patterns (albeit in some slightly different form) and encounter the same unhappiness in relationship all over again. So it is vital that we deal with the issues as deeply as we can to enable and empower the two partners to move on to better things and a better relationship with somebody else.

How do you work with relationship issues? Are you not tempted sometimes to take sides?

As a therapist I find the best way is to be non-judgmental, seeing it from both partners' point of view, deepening in understanding and not taking sides or adopting a superficial view. Two possibilities are present: either breaking up or getting back together, and with wise openness the couple usually find the way that is best for them. They should finish therapy with more skills and insight for life together or apart.

What is the next level of relationships counseling?

The next level is a deeper one in which personal differences subconsciously urge each partner to grow and develop in some way. The issue of breaking up need not arise. The issue, or issues, between the two partners indicate where change wants to happen in their relationship, or more rarely in one partner.

The couple are aware of the role of self development within their relationship and the necessity to work on intimacy and loving relationship rather than becoming complacent about it and taking each other for granted. Each partner explores their individual issues to discover what is holding them back from growing together and deepening in intimacy.

The most profound level of relationships counseling is relationship as a path of shared personal development. This means growing and expanding psychologically and/or spiritually within the relationship. The two partners consider that the primary role and power of the relationship is that it is a catalyst for personal growth, for each to change, transform and grow in love…together.

To acheive this, the couple must become concerned about re-owning their projections on to each other so that they really relate to one another. They accept and meet the challenges in their relationship as opportunities to grow. They accept compromise and go beyond their fear of deepening in real love.

Relationships represent a profoundly deep opportunity for growth and change. The chance to grow alongside another person, and have them know you better than anyone else and love you through (not in spite of) your flaws, is a powerful challenge to our resistance to know, accept and love ourselves.

BLOG entry #77

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. ‘Interview on Couples Counseling’ was first published in 2010.

Richard Harvey answers questions about personal problems, therapy and spiritual goals.

I am a long-time follower of psychological and spiritual teachings and I have practiced many methods. But I have not found what I am looking for. My question comes from my intuition that seeking is somehow linked to our inability to be present. Can you tell me how the two are linked?

The first thing to realize is that usually what we’re looking for is right in front of us! Alongside this truth is the fact that usually we don’t see or recognize it, because we are so caught up in looking for it or seeking that it doesn’t seem to occur to us that we might find what we’re looking for! Hence it’s always more interesting to us to cast our mind ahead and aspire to some distant future in which our dreams will be realized.

Now, is the only time there is. This understanding is as old as the Upanishads and as modern as the latest self-help book. But to occupy the moment, we have to rein in our aspirations for an imaginary future time. Once we have done that, we have to “be”. Now, two things are incredibly difficult for us about what seems to be a comparatively simple matter to speak about.

First, we don’t know how to withdraw from the future and, second, we don’t know how to be, in the present or any other time. Our entire life is orientated to the past—modelled on past memories, coated with past assumptions and motivated by past desires.

Nothing, really nothing, is actively present, only the past rehashing itself over and over again. Western psychology has taught us that inside us is a shadowy realm known as the unconscious. It is symbolized in dreams by the basement—a dirty, dingy place we encounter in nightmares which mat be inhabited by monsters or threatening presences. Along with a veritable junkshop of material which we have thrown into our basement is the answer to why we should inhabit our lives orientated to the past.

For here we find all our shameful needs, fears and desires that were unmet, unrequited or unfulfilled when we were too young and helpless to do anything about it. Here in this darkness we dwell in our grief and our shame, too embarrassed and humiliated to face up to ourselves. While we don’t deal thoroughly with these inner dynamics and relationships, nothing will change, including the future, which is merely a reflection of the past.

So, this is why we project ourselves ahead of the present moment, idealizing a future which can never be any different from the past, except in fantasy. Think about it: how much of your time is spent imagining how life can be, wishing for things to be different from how they are. We aspire, by way of compensation for our dismal state of dissatisfaction, to better life conditions, improved relationships, more money or power or standing in the world. Our life moves ahead like a train that never reaches its destination, but is always in-between, always leaving, always arriving, never present.

Reining in our aspirations for an imaginary future is the same as letting go of our attachment to the past. The work is challenging and demanding, but not impossible. It is enabled through deep acceptance of how things are. And we cannot do it alone. We can try, but we will never take ourselves close enough to the edge, never tolerate the degree of suffering that we need to, to bring about the inner change that finally liberates us.

The second point is our inability to “be”. Deep inside, in our essence, we may experience a sense of presence from which being comes. But this subtle sense has not been validated, so we don’t give it value. If we did, we wouldn’t do so much. We would spend more time just being and when we can be, we can allow others to be. Feeling, valuing, communing would be words that described real experiences from our everyday lives. We would be less concerned about distractions that cause us to lose touch with ourselves and our sense of being.

Being is essential to presence, but also to love and caring, to compassion, to truly touching and experiencing the world.

But our experience, from the past, is that such openness caused us much suffering, pain and hurt. At some point, we made the decision to cease to be open and vulnerable to the world. We withdrew from this pure experience, compromised ourselves and concealed our essence to protect ourselves from hostility and insensitivity.

So, this is how we are unable to be in the present—the only place where life is. We are therefore detached from life.

I heard you telling a story about Ramana Maharshi where he was saying that realized beings remained in the forest and someone asked him wouldn’t it be better if they came out and mixed with others. To which he replied, “What others?” Does this mean that the goal of enlightenment, the pursuit of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy is a sort of quietism, a withdrawal, a lack of concern about the outer world?

We have to distinguish between the inner and outer worlds, between the absolute and relative worlds and between inner reflection of a psychological nature and inner reflection of a spiritual nature to answer this.

What Ramana Maharshi said was in response to the question, “Does one person’s realization help others?” And he says, “Self-realization is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity.” Then he says,“the Self-realized person is helpful even though they remain in forest”, which I take to be a symbolic way of saying in seclusion. His answer to, “Wouldn’t it be better if they mixed with others?” is “There are no others to mix with.”

Now from the point of view of the relative, outer world and of our shared human psychology of perception this is obviously absurd! But he is speaking of beings who are Self-realized, which means that they have merged with the absolute where inner and outer are one. In Zen, the saying would be that they have swallowed the world, in other words they have realized that the outer world is inside them, rather than outside, which again sounds preposterous, until you understand that a Self-realized being is one who is totally identified with consciousness—not individual consciousness in the relative world, but the consciousness within which everything—everything— is arising.

This is very hard to understand from within the constraints of our accepted habitual way of thinking. But it should come as no surprise to people who have even a glancing acquaintance with the methods of Zen or crazy wisdom masters, whose methods are designed to shock us into awakening, that our habitual ways of thinking create the world as we are, not as it is (this is also the nature of projection in the sphere of psychology and interpersonal relationships). In other words Self-realization cannot, will not be proscribed by how we think about things.

So, if you have reached the point where everything is going on inside the consciousness you have realized that you are (you see, it even gets messy and almost impossible to talk about), then you are in relationship to everything all the time, regardless of your physical location (which is merely relative), since everything is going on within the sphere of your awareness, or consciousness. Paradoxically then, now you have the power to “do good” for example, to influence affairs and so forth, you don’t. You simply witness with compassion, devotion and love.

Now you are reminding me of personal therapy that is a kind of witnessing by the therapist without doing anything, a profound acceptance that leads to healing. Even Freud himself, when asked what was the essence of psychotherapy, said it was simply love.

He said, “Psychoanalysis in essence is a cure through love.” And yes, you’re right, because deep acceptance embraces everything in its all-accepting field. One of the lessons of practicing therapy for me has been the absolute power of non-intervention, of simply letting things be, and, without interfering, things change through finding their natural balance.

BLOG entry #76

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. ‘Interview on Therapy and Spiritual Goals – Part 2 of 2’ was first published in 2010.