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

Your work seems to go beyond the usual parameters of counseling and therapy, yet you seem reluctant to assume the role of spiritual teacher. Also you speak of ‘bridging personal therapy and spiritual growth’. So what exactly is your stance on personal problems and spiritual practice?

That they are connected in a single process and that is available to you if you wish to see it through—or go the distance. Many people who come to therapy simply want to make things better—improve their relationship to themselves or others, be more confident, less neurotic, more self-assured. Some dissatisfaction or crisis in life causes them to seek help and when the issues are dealt with—healed, resolved—they carry on with a new improved sense of themselves.

But for some the exploration of the inner world opens a bigger door—a gateway into the unknown and they become fascinated by what it may mean for them. If they pursue therapy and inner work they “flip” the board, reverse the rules of the game, and find that they are no longer so concerned about improvements or progress, but more interested in relinquishing the hold their ego has on them out of an intuition that something deeper and more valuable awaits them on the other side of a process of loss.

This process has been called depth psychotherapy or major psychotherapy in the past. It is what Jung called individuation. Or perhaps what Maslow was indicating in the higher levels of his hierarchy of needs. This way of looking at personal growth is entirely different from the present popular notion of having what you want, making the world a better place (which translates as getting more of what you want) through work on self-esteem, positive reprogramming, spiritual channeling or whatever.

Teaching spiritual wisdom and practices is simply referring you to your inner understanding, which is innate in you as a human being. I distinguish between the act of teaching and assuming the role of teacher, because everyone should be their own teacher.

I want to ask: why does a person try therapy if they are seeking spiritual goals? If you are serious, surely you’d be better off going to see a real spiritual teacher in India or the Middle East of finding someone in that tradition. How would a psychotherapist, however experienced, presume to compete with spiritual masters?

Well, speaking for myself, I wouldn’t! But your question is a very good one, because it highlights certain contemporary ideas and prejudices. Some of these ideas about therapy need to change to catch up with modern developments and some of the prejudices need to be confronted, because like all prejudice they are borne of ignorance.

Today it is perfectly viable to pursue spiritual goals in therapy, providing you find the right therapist for you. I would go further and say that the therapeutic specialty of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy is at the cutting edge of spiritual practice and living spiritual lives today, because nowhere else do we have such a linking of ancient thought, teachings, inspiration and modern day discoveries concerning humanity. So, in my view, if you are serious, go see the specialist—which is a therapist.

On the other hand any individual therapist, of course may not be up to the task. I am talking here of a psycho-spiritual (the other term is transpersonal) therapist or healer. And incidentally spiritual teachers are not always oriental or faraway and they haven’t been for a long time. About competing—well the thing to watch is “the grass is always greener” syndrome: if you find you are attracted to a therapist, healer or spiritual teacher and your mind or heart wanders off in search of a greater or more attractive one, you are experiencing a profound lesson in the psycho-spiritual process.

BLOG entry #75

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 1 of 2’ was first published in 2010.

The two basic stages to inner work are Awakening and Integrating. Here are some encouragements for each:

1.     1. Awakening Yourself

Be curious—maintain your interest and attention, be open to finding out new things about you, be attentive, question and persevere in the task of inner discovery. Be prepared to be thorough and loving in your inner work.

Be courageous and take risks—honestly confront what is going on with you, share when you want to hide from your truth, take the energy of fear, transform it and offer it in service to your heart. Be responsible for your own energy.

Suspend judgment—awareness is non-judgmental, work hard to see ‘what is’, without evaluating yourself or what you see, and this will lead to inner clarity.

Trust your inner wisdom and your personal process—one of the most valuable tools you have is the knowledge that you tend naturally towards inner health and balance. So, extremes of emotion and reaction are the inner pathway to your centre if you allow them and learn.

Stay open—in all your energy centers, pelvis, belly, heart, mind and spirit. This enables real experience and your many lessons become clear to you.

Rekindle your innocence—value your imagination and all the natural ways to creativity and healing that you left behind in childhood. Find the way back to yourself in the ways which find most natural: dancing, painting, poetry, music and rhythm, singing and play.

Be light—cultivate lightness and humor. Learning to laugh at yourself is an essential tool which distances, familiarizes and re-enchants you with yourself.

Follow your own process—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. Listen to your heart and find the courage to follow your own wise guidance.

2.    2. Integrating

Take time and allow space—to let new knowledge settle inside you where it may grow into insight and understanding, and become a part of you and be of lasting value.

Follow up—your inner work, your insights and new understanding and enable it to grow.

Keep a journal—to organize the fruits of your awareness: key words, concepts, breakthroughs, insights; to recognize your personal work and encourage yourself and keep tabs on important inner material.

Let what you are learning dream inside you—through meditation, sleeping, daydreaming, drawing with no thought, movement…and spend some time in silence.

Bring negativity into consciousness—shine the light of awareness on the cynic, saboteur, doubter, despairing one, anger, victim etc.

Start in small ways—never cause yourself to fail by setting too BIG a challenge.

BLOG entry #74

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. ‘Mind Wide Open: Inner Work—Awakening and Integrating’ was first published in 1999.

I am a psychotherapist. I came up on that idealistic, partisan wave of enthusiasm for personal exploration in the mid-seventies that was known as the Human Potential Movement. I work on that edge of therapy which has become known as “personal growth” and in nearly twenty years of seeing people—and I must have seen thousands in groups and one-to-one sessions—I am still in a state of wonder about my work, still amazed that people come in trust to tell me their deepest secrets and still marvel at how therapy “works”.

I have always held that there is nothing that is called “therapy”. Nothing, that is, outside of the healing relationship between therapist and client itself. So how come therapy works, when it does?

When a person comes to therapy there is usually a complex and conflicting mix of urges, pushes and pulls, desires, rationalizations, perhaps extreme emotions, strivings, fear and confusion going on. Hence the quite common phenomenon, following the relief of having picked up the phone and made the initial appointment, of not wanting to come to the first session at the appointed time. Usually a rational reason for starting therapy is presented to the therapist by the client, who has him or herself already presented and believed that this is the actual reason themselves. The unconscious, however, is like the hidden part of an iceberg, and in it is contained hidden, deeper reasons and a more profound purpose.

It is this purpose that the therapist does well to listen out for. Not that the client should not be believed. That would miss the point altogether. The unconscious and the conscious reasons for embarking on an inner journey may well be quite different, at least superficially, but in the conscious reason there may lie clues to the deeper purpose harbored in the unconscious, and anyway it is what the client believes and must not therefore be ignored or disrespected.

As therapy goes on there is likely to be periods of adjustment. Sometimes it is fine tuning. Other times it can feel like quite a jolt. It is like shifting levels, deepening into more authentic and profound fields of truth. Sometimes it is like changing gear; other times it is like stepping out into the unknown. The therapist (depending on the style of working) may go there with the client and be privileged to wander on that path which is not their own for the duration of the session.

It is the business of therapy to unlock the freedom and energy that are constrained by safe and habitual patterns of living. As these patterns become clear to the client the responsibility for the choices they are making is revealed. It is not, of course, the responsibility of “therapy” or the therapist to change anything at all. The client's own inner wisdom will lead them to the point of choice in their lives at the right time, and that time is usually when something needs to be done about it.

Making the serious and transforming decision to alter one's way of meeting the world on a radical level is a choice that releases us into the unknown. But the unknown is also the spontaneous, the exciting: it feels like living again, like recapturing an old vibrancy long-missed. Your eyes see in new ways, you feel as never before and you live your life in fascination, awe and gratitude.

The work of personal growth shows two faces. One side is the work on “me”—the strategy, the mask is gently lifted to uncover the authentic self, to remind us that it still exists and that it wishes to be found (and this may very well be the hidden, unconscious reason for coming to therapy in the first place). The other side is beyond “me”—the so-called transpersonal (or these days, psycho-spiritual), the mystical realms of existence. They are two sides of the same figure, so really not separate, not even really two at all. There is no reason why one side should precede, or follow, the other and indeed this is rarely the case in personal work. The personal and the spiritual will reveal itself in a jumble, a glorious mish-mash of material in which a life crisis can be re-visioned as a divine lesson, in which a spiritual helper may take the shape of a hated enemy.

It is partly to dispel, or transcend, this apparent dichotomy that a person may come to inner work initially. Even the pain of containing within ourselves conflicting emotions and the resultant turmoil is unequal to the unresolved, perhaps even unacknowledged, state in which our harmonious existence is critically dependent on spiritual, as well as physical, mental and emotional health and wholeness.

Therapy works in the end because of our innate tendency to return to the natural state of harmony, health and wholeness that is inherent in every one of us, however unaware of it we may be. The odds are, in many ways, loaded against therapy failing since all the power of the unconscious and the divine are on the side of personal deliverance. Whether that is what you want, whether that can even be imagined before it's encountered is something else and this in itself is humbling—the fact that I am not in control, that I fulfill my destiny whatever explanation I appease my mind with.

The “nothing that is called therapy” reveals itself in the end as a vehicle of transformation. It is the ship in which you made the journey to the other shore. You get out of it and, of course, you leave it behind safe in the knowledge that another vehicle will be there when you need one.

Sitting in my therapy room when my next client enters, here is the opportunity—in the client's trust , through their surrender of usual formalities, the rejection of the etiquette of repression, their willingness to find themselves and in my own resolve to “'be here”—here is the opportunity to shed falsehood and embrace authenticity, here is the opportunity to feel ourselves standing on the planet, the roots of the soul, with our heads in the heavens, the home of the spirit, and with everything in between.

BLOG entry #73

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 “Nothing that is Called Therapy”’ was first published in 1998.

“For many of us there is a spiritual truth that the traditional centres of worship, spirituality and religion do not address and may not even allow.”

The Outer World

Whether it is just a bad dream or an illusion the world “out there” exists in some sense or other and, since I seem to be able to interact with it, it seems wise to seek help from it.

Purpose of Existence

Should the purpose of existence have any meaning at all, then it must surely be to deepen into the eternal, learn and experience, becoming who I really am. If I am living to learn then I will choose wise friends.

Living to Experience

Wisdom comes from experience; knowledge comes from thinking. Learning to experience I cast off the restraints of the ‘safe’', tried and tested ways I have learned to protect myself. These not only insulate me from reality in my life, they limit me also in terms of experience. True experience invites spontaneity—the unexpected—and leads to joy. The whole spectrum of experience is made real through the willingness to experience without your mind as a buffer. This way even sadness, grief and despair may be, apparently paradoxically, overcome. They may even enrich us along the way.

Material and Ritual

All matter is suffused with energy and that energy is to be respected and honored—appropriately. For many of us the very idea of honoring carries with it a bogus and forced aspect, since we were exhorted to honor our father and mother and all kinds of other things which we have rebelled against either inwardly or outwardly (or both). Honoring is important because it expresses our ability and our tendency to value both ourselves and our world. So it should not be taken too lightly and at the same time it should not be forced upon you so that the very act of expressing value and gratitude is rendered valueless and resented.

Ritual does not have to be prescribed. Ritual abounds, is indeed potential in everything we do, and becomes available to the person who is aware and witnessing. This way it becomes possible to treat your whole life as a ritual of deep meaning. Whenever we sense an opportunity for spontaneous ritual, we should allow it to lead us. We will find that it is a doorway further into ourselves, a deepening into ourselves and the world – the opportunity should never be missed.

In all material things we can learn to recognize symbols and open to their sense. It is not necessary to analyze the symbols or even to understand them. You should be able and open to living with them. Respect everything!

Exercise

Bring an act of sacredness into the mundane by selecting an activity or an area of your life for practice. Clean a corner of your house in awareness of the symbolic aspect of each individual item and each act you carry out. Deepen in this meditation over a period of time. Record your experiences and the feelings and insights you have while doing it.

Your Life is Your Dream of Truth

Your life is your dream of truth. You carry your dream inside you. So imbue life with respect and reverence and allow this to reflect back on you…and experience the flow of the inner and outer worlds as One.

Living in the Moment

I do not have to carry around this baggage of my existence any longer. Without it I may at last live freely. For it is only when I become free of myself that I am free to be myself. Experiencing the moment—where life is happening—I must let go of my expectations, my disappointments, my knowledge, my prejudice, my patterns, my longings and hopes, my neediness and plenty, all my dichotomies and live! and live fully.

BLOG entry #72

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. ‘Wise Friends’ was first published in 1998.

Humanistic psychotherapy offers a broad array of many, varied approaches which can be characterised by certain common themes. First, there is great emphasis placed on taking responsibility for ourselves. It follows that the humanistic therapist refrains from being a “problem solver” or “the expert”. Second, great trust is placed in the integrity of the individual, in his or her intrinsic value and in wholeness. Third, an aim of the work is self-empowerment and realising personal potential. It follows that someone wishing to work with a humanistic psychotherapist need not be sick or even have any obvious problems in their life.

In the 70s when many people were first attracted to humanistic psychology, the approaches were often mixed and practiced eclectically: Gestalt, which emphasised the here and now and addressed the resolution of internal conflicts; Bioenergetics, which showed how he body expressed and held emotional trauma; encounter, which encouraged openness, honesty ad following energy; rebirthing, which sought the resolution of the birth trauma; guided fantasy, a transpersonal approach for contact with the higher self—not to mention Rogerian therapy, co-counselling, psychodrama, neo-Reichian work, primal integration and even Jungian dream work, meditation and much more.

Now that humanistic psychotherapy has, in a sense, “come of age” there is much more emphasis on the integration of the various techniques and approaches. Research is now uncovering what many therapists already knew: that in psychotherapy it is the quality of the relationship between client and therapists that is essentially healing and therapeutic and in comparison the therapist’s orientation is largely unimportant. This is surely because psychotherapy must ultimately address the issue of being rather than doing. Much has been written in the humanistic canon about warmth, empathy, resonating, presence, love and the depth and quality of contact that the therapist needs to offer. This means that humanistic practitioners can never afford to become complacent or neglect their own ongoing development.

Humanistic therapy is practiced in groups and in one-to-one sessions. One-to-one work allows trust and support to develop in the ongoing relationship between client and therapist. This relationship may be quite unique. Since the therapist is not someone you have to relate with outside the therapy session, risks may be taken and deep confidences shared which may feel impossible to share with a close friend or family member. Group workshops offer a stimulating forum where issues can be identified and worked through. Seeing others working with issues like your own can be very helpful.

The effects of psychotherapy are wide-ranging: to help people through “stuck” places in their lives, to develop awareness of limiting patterns of behaviour and resolve past conflicts and painful experiences, to encourage clarity, new perceptions and tolerance of experience, to enable and empower and to embrace wholeness and authenticity.

I have entitled my own work with groups, the Change Workshops. We are surrounded by and constantly challenged by change in our lives. We experience freedom according to our ability to flow with changing life and to tolerate the fullness of that experience mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. I work with the confines of separation—separation from each other, from experience and from our Higher Self—and with the potential that we each have to surrender to and trust in life.

BLOG entry #71

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. ‘Humanistic Psychotherapy’ was first published in 1992.