…In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. 
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

T S Eliot, “East Coker”, The Four Quartets[1]

In spite of everything that we can learn in training to practice psychotherapy, we remain largely ignorant. Faced with another being”—whether we call him “client” or “therapist”—we are confronted with this choice: will we follow the well-trodden path of dead ritual, of conformity to the known, or will we accept the challenge to “be” together in the moment, with “what is”, to step into the unknown. This demands great courage. Very often what we “know” is a hindrance.

What I love about my work most is that it presents me with so many opportunities to grow. It is the most fulfilling work I can imagine. I remember, shortly after I started to make my living from practicing therapy, seeing an article in a tabloid newspaper that asked the question “Who would you most like to be?” I realised that I really most wanted to be me! And it was a wonderful feeling and a privileged feeling to realise that I was who I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do.

Further down the road in my life as a therapist, I often feel that it wouldn’t really matter what I did as a job anymore. Somehow everything seems potentially growthful. When I earned my living doing jobs I resented, becoming a therapist seemed like the only way. Now I practice therapy for a living all activities seem like the way.

In this deep meeting between who I am and what I do there is healing. For many years of my life I felt despairing, disconnected, inauthentic—a deep sense of something lacking—which gave rise to all kinds of problems. The problems sometimes were dazzling. They were fascinating. So intriguing I never got through them deeply enough to identify and understand where they came from.

I now know that at their source was a deep experience of separation. My activity was separate from my identity, I didn’t feel my feelings, I didn’t know that I had a body, I experienced intense periods of “divine longing”^[2], projected outwards and reflected back to me in all sorts of frustration and unfulfillment.

My experience is not, however, that all these limitations are behind me. The truth is hard to write about. In so many ways I am still the same as I ever was. I might say, as Ram Dass has said:

In all my years (of self-exploration)…I don’t think I have got rid of one of my neuroses. But what has changed is, instead of getting so caught in them and taking my personality so seriously, I invite them in for tea!^[3]

It is a matter of simultaneity. It is a matter of levels”—of not getting stuck.

The difference between the “me” of today and the “me” of a few years ago or so is that, whereas I used to live out a narrow segment of the spectrum of my life’s possibilities, I now try to be open to the mandala of my life – a whole 360 degrees of potential and experience.

In this all things become opportunities for growth. I can learn from all my life situations. Not that I ever did otherwise. But what took most of my effort was getting through my resistance. And my resistance came out of the separation between who I (thought I) was and what was happening to me. From my wanting things to be a certain way and not wanting them to be another way.

When a person comes to work with me usually some form of this separation is evident. So, too, is his^[4] resistance. I wonder what is preventing him from experiencing his life. Because what holds our beings away from life is something that therapy addresses very well.

Each person carries with them a story. The story is one of adventure and danger, of threat and survival, of gifts and loss. There are good characters and bad characters, all sorts of interactions and private moments, promises, disappointments, agonies and ecstasies. This is the drama of all good stories. We are each of us attached to our story. It is, in a sense, who we are. At least we think it is.

In fact, it is who we were. And somehow our attachment to our story, our possessiveness of it as we clutch hold of its constantly unfolding drama, results in it being who we become, who we will be. For the future is only as real as the past, when all things are known. And we know our past. And so we know our future, when we are attached to our story.

What I have to offer is a space for the person to tell their story in, to be their story, to bring it slap-bang, manifested into form, into the room. So that we can look at it and say “Is that who you are?”

The new story that unfolds in the space is the story of who we are. As I meet this person in my awareness, as both our attentions are trained on the process, on the present, on what is happening, something new must take place. It must take place because we are letting go of the past by bringing the past into form, by telling the story, by listening to the story.^[5]

As Lao Tzu puts it:

What is in the end to be shrunken, Begins by being first stretched out. What is in the end to be weakened, Begins by being first made strong.^[6]

A modern Jungian, commenting on the myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal, speaks of the mourners as models for psychotherapists. Their…

…echoing makes a litany, transforms the pain…It makes out of life’s dark misery a song of the goddess. It establishes art as a reverent and creative and sympathetic response to the passions and pains of life. And it shows the potency of such a litany. For with their mirroring song they ransom a goddess of life.^[7]

As the past, the known, is acknowledged we are opening a path to a future that is unknown. We are making it possible to be, to be in the present moment. And all life, all existence takes place in the present moment.

This is where transformation takes place. This is the condition for true experience. This is where you find your real self, your authenticity. This is where identity and experience may become one.

And yet the present moment is overwhelmingly threatening. It relives memories of life-threatening situations. Before our stories were ever written inside us. Before we had answers and defences, before we found a way out of an intolerable present.

I have learnt to be more comfortable with fear, to work with it as a friend. It is interesting how the more I befriend fear the more hidden fears become. Not only am I now less afraid, but also my fears have become subtler, deeper and less specific. Fear is just fear!

When I realise that, it is very useful. I have to be afraid of something is how I think. I am afraid is how I feel. So fear latches onto the present moment, the vast unknown in which anything can happen.

Objects for fears are like subjects for anger, objects for needs and so on. The object is a projection of our separation. Object is a word and words create our confusion.

The “I” wants to dominate, exclude, make boundaries and divide the self in which we are all one.^[8]

The outer world of objects confirms the inner world of experience. How is it possible to relate to pure experience, to experience un-objectified and un-projected?

Meditation techniques surely provide a way and therapy complements meditation. In meditation the journey is inside-to-outside. In therapy the journey is outside-to-inside. I had always empathised with eastern spiritual thought: philosophy and practice. In western psychotherapy I discovered a counterpart. Put the two together and it’s like digging a tunnel from both ends!

As we wind our projections back in, a great responsibility falls on us. No longer will we be able to hide behind our range of excuses. No longer can we blame the other. We are responsible for our successes and failures – responsible even for defining what these terms mean.

When we are fully identified with our experiences then we are ourselves. When I am my experience and my experience is no longer objectified, I am no longer separate and it seems to me that inherent human qualities of true relationship may now manifest.

We talk so often of kindness, of caring, of compassion and love. The words are commonplace. I find the actuality of these qualities is more common than we acknowledge. If I use my awareness, am in the present moment, not separate from my real experience then everything can appear to me as love and compassion.

Am I projecting a new level of reality? Maybe, but the desire for enlightenment is a singular desire:

The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.^[9]

And when I do not feel separate then I open the way to great joy and ecstasy in my life.

Which brings me back to “tolerating” experience. Most of the people who come to work with me (like me once upon a time!) want to be “happy”. How can I tell them that deep is deep, that experience is experience, that being just “is”. I find that to tolerate pain brings with it the ability to experience joy and vice versa. I find that there is actually no separation between the two. They are one figure, one experience. When I am with them, without resistance, I am alive, I experience life.

I would like to discuss what I sometimes consider my philosophy: Awareness – Acceptance – Letting Go. In a way awareness is all. Acceptance flows from it. Letting go is the experience of choice, the experience of change.

Awareness is our natural state, our birthright. I can still remember when I was about thirteen year old starting into a new day with the vivid consciousness that the world had somehow become more dull. I remember saying to myself, “Surely I used to feel more alive once”. I had distant memories of experience being more vibrant. Something had been lost.

I had a similar experience when I was seven. Then I had fallen into a deep reverie on death itself. Isolated in my absorption I could only explain to the adults around me that I had a stomach-ache. They felt younger than me. I thought they would be scared of what I was experiencing. I wanted to protect them and I wanted to be protected. Consciously I was afraid of death, unconsciously I was afraid of life, and both were the unknown to me.

My life is the answer to the question of death. I sought the undying, the eternal in many shapes and forms. My emphasis was on the seeker and the search. My life used to take me further away from the deathless.

The very bottom is a place from where you can only rise. It is like the man running from his own shadow who

…did not understand that if he had stayed in the shade he would have lost his shadow, and by standing still he would have ceased making footprints.^[10]

Out of stillness awareness will arise and acceptance will grow. Practicing awareness, seeing “what is” is the powerful halting experience when we are out on a search. We listen to the silence between the words; we see the process around the content. We become a witness to our participation in experience and in this we can truly learn.

The power of my rational mind still dazzles me. As I go on in my bewitching acts of creation what I know is complemented by what I don’t know, what I can speak about is partner to the unspeakable. The practice of awareness connects all of this in the relationship between the human and the divine.

So out of my ego creations, my personal dramas, awareness leads me to my heart. This is the experience of coming home. This is where the authentic self lives. This is where I find myself and where the mystical journey, the transpersonal journey, into my Higher Self can begin.

I see the point of choice, of letting go, transformation and change as taking double effort in a way. There is a deep connection between the Higher Self and the human. The human side must often surrender and in a meeting with divine space”—transformation.

This is the closest I can get to an explanation. Why else are we sometimes left waiting so long? This is an attempt to understand, to speak of the unspeakable.

Resistance to surrender is painful.^[11] The model of identity is strong. It feels life-threatening to let go. I am (usually unconsciously) attached to my drama, embarrassed and ashamed about owning that and fearful of forsaking it. Yet I know that freedom lies beyond it. In the moments that I transcend it, form meets with the formless. I experience my wholeness and may glimpse the all-embracing interconnectedness of all things

BLOG entry #70

Last month in this column Exeter psychotherapist Richard Harvey wrote an article on therapy and politics. I liked the article and considered the issues that were raised so important that I decided to do a follow-up interview with Richard, so that we could explore some of these matters in more depth. What follows is an edited extract from a much longer discussion.

Paul: What do your ideas about therapy and politics actually mean in practice? If a National Front member came to you, would you challenge his politics?

Richard: That’s a strange question—it’s never happened to me or any other therapist I know! But I’d treat politics just like anything else. I’d try to ask the kind of questions that would promote greater awareness. I certainly don’t ignore the political dimension in therapy. On the other hand it’s not my job to try to change people’s ideas by arguing with them.

P: Do you think that the work you do—in groups for example—can contribute to social problems?

R: You can’t quantify success or failure in the inner realms, but I am sure that we should be doing this kind of work anyway. Any place where we can look at how we relate to other people is good. You ask me about the relationship between psychotherapy and the world outside. Well, I’ve just come back from a five-day meditation retreat and when I left I heard about the events in the Gulf for the first time. Now, you can look at this in Jungian terms; the relations between the great powers have improved, but the shadow has to emerge somewhere else. What we can all do is look at the part of ourselves that is in the shadows.

P: I’m interested in the question of the legitimate power of the therapist—a political matter if ever there was one! Let me pose a dilemma that I know is real. A client starts crying about a recent event and then says that is was something that happened in a past life. Do you let them explore that, or do you insist that they stay in the present life?

R: In general I would follow the client. But if it was someone I knew well and I was aware that they always cut off into past lives when anything painful came up, I would point that out and give them the opportunity to look at what they were avoiding. But I’d have to be pretty confident about my relationship with them to do that.

P: What are your main interests at the moment?

R: My pet subject at the moment is male energy. I can quite understand why there’s a tendency to negate this—to put it crudely, we’ve had several thousand years of patriarchy and we’ve ballsed it up—but male energy needn’t be destructive. It’s likely to become so if it’s repressed in fact. We need to own it and affirm it.

P: Is male energy just another name for aggression?

R: No. Aggression is an expression of energy, male energy included, but that’s by no means the whole story. I sometimes think of it as like the sea, which can be destructive. But it is so much else as well. It’s a question of the use of energy—how we use it—and of being in touch with it, not repressing and perverting it.

P: There seems to be some kind of general crisis of sexual relations going on at the moment.

R: Yes, It’s got many aspects. For example, I think there are a great number of men who are out of touch with their male energy and turning their wives into mothers. And many women are ready to carry out the mothering role. Again I can see how this kind of thing has happened and I think that facing up to some of these issues might help.

P: I never thought that the way men reacted to the Women’s Movement, with total self-contempt, was very helpful—to them or to the women.

R: But that was my first reaction! I suppose I was quite ignorant about male oppression until I opened up to Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin and some of the other feminist writers. Then I took it all on board at once and the result was I felt a huge amount of guilt.

P: Is male energy the centre of your therapeutic work at the moment?

R: Like most therapists I find that the majority of people who come to me are women! I would definitely like to work on these issues with more men.

P: Thank you for speaking with us Richard.

R: It has been my pleasure. Thank you.

BLOG entry #69

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. ‘Natural Health: Richard Harvey talks to Paul Blake’ was first published in 1990.

As a group facilitator, I often use mini-group or dyad formats in larger group workshops. People who are new to this work, as well as people with a great deal of experience often bring a poor quality of attention to the passive-receptive aspect of group exercises. Lack of openness or indifferent listening may not only be a reflection of a group participant’s own inner turmoil, confusion or avoidance, but may also be due to an unpracticed, or unrecognized, ability to be passively available and receptive in a helping mode for another.

To some degree it seems the notion of “being present” (a common term in popular therapy jargon) may have become an unquestioned notion where the appearance of attention and concern may eclipse the more fruitful questioning of the quality of presence actually involved and demanded to be an effective listener.

For this reason I recently devoted a two-hour session of an ongoing evening group to the subject of listening. My group work is usually experiential and relatively unstructured. This format came together as the group unfolded and the exercises sprung from my contemplations on listening. This workshop proved effective in encouraging a new awareness of motivation, intent and the quality of listening and attentiveness brought to bear when with another in a helping role.

I am documenting the group because it has proved useful in subsequent group sessions and because the process deepened the overall quality of work among the participants in this group.

The group began with a brief sharing session. We sat in a circle and those who wished to stated their present feelings or described life situations that were concerning them.

I invited them to choose two partners to form groups of three and make themselves comfortable. One person in each group was asked to share in greater depth. The other two were asked to listen.

After a few minutes the two listeners were asked to assess their own listening abilities, honestly and privately, and if appropriate award themselves a score between one and ten to indicate how well they considered they had listened.

I asked them to repeat the exercise, only this time the listeners were to become aware of any criticisms or judgments of the sharer, the sharing, the room, the group, the group leader. After a few minutes, I asked them to reassess the listeners in themselves, in the light of how much of their attention has actually been involved in criticism and judgment, and adjust their score.

The same exercise was repeated three more times, allowing each of the participants to take a turn as the sharer, and each time adjusting the score. In the first of these repetitions the listeners were asked to become aware of how much the subject matter they heard was filtered through a veil in which the listener related through his or her own experience with the assumption that he “knew”, understood or had had the experience that the sharer was relating, so reducing what he heard to the “known”.

Next, I asked them to be aware of avoiding certain issues raised in the contents of the sharer’s experience, and especially undesirable feelings or reminders of unpleasant personal experiences.

Finally, I introduced the idea of listening with the whole body—not just the ears—and I asked how much of them had been available to the sharer? Had their hearts been present? What responses had they felt on the physical level? What quality of eye-contact, presence and availability had they brought to the whole exercise?

The next exercise began with some stretching and opening movements and then group members were invited to meet each other as they moved about the room and expressed the statement, “I can’t know what it’s like to be with you,” to each other.

They repeated the exercise with the two statements, “I don’t care what it’s like to be you,” and, “I really care about you.” With each statement, they made eye-contact with members of the group individually and finally, with eyes closed, expressed the statement to individuals who were important to them outside the group.

Following a short session for sharing and feedback in a circle, we discussed active listening—reflecting, being attentive, following and saying when you lose touch, being fully present, sharing personal experience clearly and relevantly. The group divided into pairs and time was allowed for each to share and listen, bringing into awareness all the insights and focus we had come across in the room.

The quality of contact in the group at this stage was richer than before. Each group member was more present. There was a sense of ease and sincere, unstrained caring with the listeners and openness and trust from the sharers.

In our final discussion, we talked about the individual’s ability to be with his or her self and bringing that ability—cultivated through meditation, contemplative practices, physical exercises, personal therapy or other activities—into our willingness to be present for others. We talked about being easy with the silences between the words and the healing that can take place there.

It is now about six weeks since I led the listening group and wrote the above account. The implications and insights of a workshop are often manifold and profound. I now understand that not only was the group effective in developing awareness of listening in the participants but that also it was very apposite in my journey. My work is moving now into a far deeper quality of following and presence.

BLOG entry #68

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. ‘Listening: An Experiential Group Model’ was first published in 1989.

In 1968 I was a pupil at Hele’s School in Exeter. An angry, energetic boy called Steve used to invite me to the CND demos in Princesshay. I was idealistic and laid-back. I never went. He liked Bob Dylan for the protest. I liked him for the poetry and the feeling. I was interested in yoga and meditation. He was a pragmatist and an atheist. He wanted to change the world. I wanted to change myself. We stood for two sides of an argument.

When the personal growth movement made such an impact on so many people’s lives in the late Seventies, one of the criticisms was, understandably, that the people in it were turning their backs on political and social issues because they lacked social awareness and a social conscience.

In spite of feminist therapy, particularly the Women’s Centre in London and the increasing number of therapy and counselling publications which addressed the issue of social awareness, reflecting the need for individual therapy and growth to be seen in a wider socio-political context, this criticism may still be heard today.

R D Laing said in The Politics of Experience in 1967:

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially persons, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

So what is the relation between therapy/personal growth and politics/social awareness?

Obviously there are people involved in politics with a highly developed social awareness who have no awareness of their inner process whatsoever, as there are people involved in their personal growth to the exclusion of all else, including the person sitting next to them. However, these are extremes.

I believe the answer to this question is important and that it lies in balance. How effective are you in the political forum if you are filled with violence, anger and prejudice against the injustice of people who may be motivated by exactly the same kinds of thoughts and emotions as you have? How aware is the work of personal growth if it produces self-aware individuals with expanded, responsive hears and minds who don’t give a damn about social injustice, political bigotry and patriarchal dominance?

The two areas of therapy and politics need to inform each other. The therapy people need to use their personal clarity, power and expansiveness in political arenas. The political people need to bring their wider awareness into the growth movement.

The “new therapies” (still an unfortunate term I think) are not for ill people. So-called “mental illness” must be seen in the light of social conditioning anyway. Growth groups could be a place where politically-active people came to let go of the imbalance of emotions they experience about political issues. With new clarity their thinking and work may become more direct and more effective.

But I am not saying that these issues should not be used as catalysts to offload deeper, long-held anger. As a psychotherapist and a leader of personal growth groups I believe it would be quite wrong if I used a personal growth buzz phrase like “personal responsibility” to imply that it is someone’s fault that they are in their life situation with their individual mix of problems, dilemmas and personal issues. The issues are always much more complex. Prejudice, selfishness, violence, elitism, vindictiveness, power-hunger all have their emotionally-driven motivations. Where are the political people who will explore their emotions? Where are the personal growth people who will truly expand their consciousness?

If I met Steve today I would be curious to see where his route led him. We were both idealists. He thought he was right and the world was wrong. I thought the world was alright and I was wrong. Somehow, between us, I guess we had something of an answer.

BLOG entry #67

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 and Politics was first published in 1990.

I was considering music, philosophy, Zen, karate, and psychotherapy. Why? Because these are the pursuits that I have taken seriously at different times of my life. I considered the increasing sense of depth I experience as I become acquainted with a subject or practice. The more I learn, the more I don’t know. I project the sage, wise person, experienced one onto the seasoned practitioner and yet if my experience is right, that the more I find out the less I know, then he should be aware of knowing even less than I know!

Sometimes I have met conceit and arrogance in those in senior positions. (How different from Shunriyi Suzuki’s “beginner’s mind”). Concealing bitterness and disillusionment, they try to mask their pain by humiliating the young idealist. I have always been an idealist, a dreamer, an optimist and an innocent. I don’t see any reason not to be.

I was wondering, since they have become the two great pools of fascination and interest in my life, what music might have to do with therapy. Why, as a musician turned psychotherapist, my inner experience of each is actually the same.

I think they meet in poetry.

Music is a profound, complex interplay of tone, space, intervals, rhythm and mood. (Even the terms are ambiguous!) How like our individual journey through our own psyche; through personality, the unconscious, the mysterious essence we all share in—in and out of private sessions, workshops, everyday life, dreaming, fantasy and reality.

Even the clarity and fulfillment we experience as we complete our work—or aspects of our work—on ourselves may be paralleled in the climax of a symphony or in the rounding off of a good song.

There is poetry in the fulfillment of form and in the experience, in the working through, of form; a pleasure we can take in things unfolding; a natural healing process we may be witnessing in our own or another’s therapy; an interpretation, a representation emblematic of the natural or of the God-made; a meeting in full circle in music—poetry as the evocation of the formless in form, as we discover the unformed center of ourselves, through our curiosity of our human shape and our humanness.

Yet we are an organism of rigid thought patterns and beliefs. As a therapist, how often have I sat opposite a new seeker who professes the willingness and the urgency to change his life, with little or no awareness of the necessity for escaping from the narrow prison of his beliefs?

As we work together, we find the structure of the prison is bound together with fear and anxiety. Pain and anger show through the façade. The deepest terror of annihilation is the foundation. And yet no two prisons are alike. In our gentle probing and in bringing awareness to this confining structure—the little mind operating with the powerful support of our physicality—we slowly introduce into consciousness past traumas, buried truths, unacceptable realities and clashes of integrity.

Awareness itself is the healer. As therapists we are present to encourage, to support, to reflect and sometimes to guide, to gently steer. Here is the need for “play”, the need for a sensitive, poetic approach and way of being with the seeker. No therapeutic method can be worth more than the therapist’s application of it. The deeper I go into therapy work, the less I do. Less is done, yet more is achieved. I am there simply to punctuate the meeting of the client with himself. Sometimes I am just there to witness.

This client does not conform to a type or duplicate a teaching example from a counseling course. Yet he may be pliable, malleable to my belief system. We may reduce the quality of our contact through my input. I have to be careful not to interfere and not to interpret. I have to develop an appreciation of the poetry of the being who is before me.

As an antidote to the definition and confinement of past, early life experience, the receptivity and allowing of the therapist nourishes trust and courage in the seeker. The seeker expands into the new space that is created. The effect on his world is hugely transforming. Sometimes it may even shrink away from him, even as he used to diminish himself to accommodate it.

There is no such thing as society, only men and women in society and some may pull in one direction and some in another.

The most transforming thing that has happened to me is the re-locating of my centre. Ever since I could remember I had taken my cues, my frame of reference, from people, situations and messages outside myself. I was on an addictive, dissatisfying wheel of longing, striving and failing to get attention, acceptance and love.

As a seeker I have learnt to let go of my fears of tyrannical authority, found out that my emotional and material poverty reflects more my own capacity to receive and be open than any innate lack in the world outside. I have learnt to listen to an inner voice that I can trust, share, confide in and ask. There is no need to seek a higher authority as a substitute.

When my centre is located within myself I am self-governing, self-motivated and self-sufficient. In this place I find myself most available, most connected with others. From this place I may genuinely feel another’s pains or pleasure. I may truly empathise. For the first time I have felt truly connected to the peoples of the world, embraced that enormity and felt I belong, felt we are all somehow the same in essence.

We each of us touch a part of the elephant. From where each of us is standing this fragile, delicate, powerful, frightening, beautiful dance looks different. Yet it is the same dance.

Each of us is composing the poetry of our own lives. Each of us makes his contribution to the masterpiece.

You cannot reduce this to method, to duality even, or science. Always the unknown, the unexplainable, the edge of mystery points to the unfathomableness and wonder of this state into which we are born.

I never cease to wonder at the depth, the quality and the vast spaciousness of the here and now. I never fail to miss it when I try to put it into words.

BLOG entry #66

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. Psychotherapy, Poetry and Music was first published in 1989.