Therapy is a word—presently the subject of popular jokes and board games. People involved with it are variously ridiculed by the defensive, “What do you need that for?”—the hidden assumption being “I don’t need it”, or are held in some awe for their involvement.

Perhaps all practices and philosophies that are radically questioning or potentially transformative have been always regarded with suspicion and mistrust and become the brunt of prejudice and ridicule in the same way. For “therapy” is not only a very powerful tool for exploring the inner psyche and emotions. With more people becoming involved with it—taking individual responsibility for their needs and desires, for facing their fears, dealing constructively and safely with their anger and so on—it also implies a radically different world in which we are less prone and vulnerable to “experts”; authority and directives and more self-directed, motivated and sufficient.

In the last forty years there has been a steady building of basic philosophies into a body that has been both a reaction and an extension to the two traditional psychological approaches: psychoanalytic and behavioural. With some crossover and influences from eastern spiritual disciplines and philosophies a new psychology of humanism now emphasise personal experience and the well human being in both physical and emotional, as well as spiritual aspects. Thereby bringing together aspects of human existence previously splintered between doctor, psychiatrist and priest.

Humanistic psychology is a philosophy of well-being, of wholeness. It is a positive reaction to the fears and paranoia engendered by the conclusions drawn by the first psychologists, anxious to attain scientific status installing in us fears about child-rearing, homosexuality, anger etc. It presents a freer outlook in a world now so dominated by the hugely imbalanced distribution of power that the individual is now almost unable to conceive of an autonomous, self-empowered lifestyle free of the effect of tyrannical authority both materially (government, world powers), emotionally (manipulation from family members and commercial advertising) an spiritually.

Such is the larger picture. As a therapist my work tends, and I say this respectfully, towards the mundane: the cauldron of unexpressed emotions, unrequited desires, hopes, needs and fears that each individual brings to the therapeutic encounter is a continual source of fascination and challenge to me, as each person reveals his or her own special life view, and with courage shares it with another in trust and openness.

My own approach includes bodywork derived from Bioenergetics and Neo-Reichian methods, which start from a body-mind position that our bodies are the physical expression of our emotional state. Hence, suppressed feeling cause chronic muscular tensions and result in an inhibited flow of energy, which has many implications for health and disease.

I also use the more verbal methods of Gestalt therapy for increasing awareness, helping to resolve inner conflicts and learning to take responsibility for our actions.

I use many other humanistic approaches—breathing as a way to contact feelings, exploring dreams and relevant myths, guided imagery, regression work to get in touch with suppressed memories and meditation as an awareness technique and to bring us to stillness and deeper truths.

All the personal work that comes out of these approaches takes a lot of integration. A group workshop or a course of private sessions is never the sole ground for growth. Time is needed for change to occur. It is the developing of the client’s awareness and insights between sessions that is the vehicle in which he or she becomes able to bring the fruits of the work out into the world and ultimately transform their lives or aspects of their work.

During this period of work and integration which may span months or years, the client is usually surprised or angry that the world and important figures in his world are unable to see the changes taking place. This is because he is working inside-to-outside. A special intimacy develops between client and therapist as this may be the only relationship in which the inner progress, which is so apparent to the client, is acknowledged.

The approaches of psychotherapy, or indeed of any individual psychotherapist, are rich and varied, as they must be in the attempt to reflect and clarify the manifold processes of human life. I am not able to cover anything like the ground necessary to do justice to the title of this article (hence a personal view).

I hope that as more people open to what therapy can offer them that the prejudice will disappear and the association of sickness and mental illness with the new psychotherapeutic approaches will dissolve. Everyone has the right to explore their potential and regain the freedom once denied them.

BLOG entry #65

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—A Personal View was first published in 1989.

A Teaching Interview with Richard Harvey

Q: What concerns you most in the world today?

RH: The deep authentic ways and means to the truth are atrophying. The shallowness of the culture today on a worldwide scale has degraded to such a degree that we are in danger of losing our way entirely.

Q: Losing our way?

RH: Our way to the Source of existence, to the Mysteries, to what we have thought of as God

Q: God? What is God?

RH: God is the ancient term – one of many – for the truth, for reality, for the mystery of existence.

Q: Not a man in the sky, a creator, a father-figure or magician?

RH: No, that was a fabrication of society to keep people in ignorance.

Q: Why?

RH: People are easier to manage when they don’t think for themselves, when they act more or less the same, when the wildness and the call to ecstasy is taken out of them.

Q: What “call to ecstasy”?

RH: This is one of the aspects of human life I am talking about. The way of ecstasy is all but erased in so-called western culture.

Q: But some people would say that we have more today and that art and music, young people at raves and festivals, sports events like the Olympics, increased leisure time and communications is welding us together into a cohesive world family.

RH: Well, there’s no ecstasy. The proof is in the fact that the means and the ways have to be repeated. How often do you have a young person who says, “I’ve done the festivals, the raves, the social media or whatever and it has left me with a lasting sense of happiness, so I don’t need to do it anymore.” This is the function of real spiritual practice: to bring you to a point of authentic experience which is constantly happy and always ecstatic. You won’t find it in the world or through these worldly pursuits.

Q: Why not?

RH: Because they are material; they are gross; they are immersed in the philosophy of lack and desire. You go to some place or someone or something to get a result and make something happen. So the orientation is flawed from the beginning.

Q: So you’re saying it’s no good trying to get something you want from someone or somewhere or something else?

RH: That’s right and you know it’s true. The best you will get is a temporary appeasement, a brief relief from your torment. Human beings are tremendous and our capacity for happiness and our appetite for ecstasy are unlimited – unlimited!

BLOG entry #64

In J D Salinger's wonderful book Franny and Zooey the main protagonist begins in the bath and by the end of the book he has progressed to the bedroom. This is the main protagonist, the book’s hero, the central action. Along the way he is thwarted variously by his mother’s controlling insensitivity, his sister’s attachments, and his maudlin memories. Toward the end of the book, having reached his bedroom, he phones his sister Franny (who is in the next room!) and pretends that he is at the appointment he will inevitably miss due to his prolonged procrastination.

Zooey is an outstanding example of a man caught in habit, an automaton dominated by reaction, his rajas dwarfed by his tamas, his yang by his yin. Forces of destruction are his only hope, his only resort. His disempowerment, weakness, and physical illness all define his fully compromised character. He is caught in a pre-natal obstruction, the Sartre-esque state of "no exit," of no escape from the ambivalence in the womb caught between bliss and catastrophe.

Zooey inhabits a schizoid world where through his intense withdrawal he is disengaged and effectively out of relationship with the world, its inhabitants, and its events. Feelings and responses and spontaneous relationship are anathema to him. He reacts to the objects of his mind, but only the safe ones that have no real meaning or if they have meaning, they have no real visceral, experiential reality and affect. This fantasy world must be destroyed for Zooey to live.

Death is a great shock, as is the passing of a loved one, the end of a long spell living in the same location, the end of a career when you are made redundant. We become cushioned and secure in habit, in the repetition of the same action, same friends, same environment, same tasks.

Real spirituality on the other hand is vital, spontaneous, and most of all surrendered. Nothing may ever be the same, not because it may not be the same, but because when you have entered Reality it simply isn’t the same. Nothing is repeated: even in nature there are no two leaves or stones alike. Neither are there two moments the same. This is not because there is a spiritual significance to apparently infinite differentiation (there isn’t, because it's merely relative), but because there is only one eternal moment and from the point of view of that moment you will see from relative reality everything changing, always different, never repeating. You seek the solace of habit to reverse this relative truth, but behind this is the even deeper truth to which you are far more resistant—the eternal moment through which you enter into unchanging, deathless Reality.

BLOG entry #63

Thinking and Acting in Present Time

Among the signs of third-stage awakening is the ability to be doing -- thinking or acting -- in present time, without identifying yourself with the mind running ahead of itself and being invested in the outcome of what you are doing. The accepted conformist approach to action is inevitably to be doing something in order to bring something else about. We have been taught that this is the way of human beings in the world. Wasting your time is often equated with not doing something which engenders a positive outcome. Using your time wisely is working toward or struggling to attain a desirable result. Yet there is nothing inherently wise in this attitude. Doing something in order to bring about something else when extrapolated into a lifetime of practice would simply mean that we never experienced our life for one single moment, while the promise of moments filled with desirable something elses await us in some fantasy moment in the future.

Spiritual Practice in Present Time

Here we begin to detect and fathom something of the modern day malaise of meaninglessness, anxiety, possession, and deferring our deeper needs in favor of superficial and ultimately unrewarding desires. Modern humans have missed the simple physics of the passing of time in the relative dimension of time and space. As mysterious as it has become, only anxiety and frustration remain, as activity engenders further activity and desires recede before our very eyes, never to be caught up with as they disappear over the distant horizon. If only we taught the principle of the practice of present time.

Spiritual discipline involves our use of the concept of present time not as an end in itself, which would merely be replacing one desirable outcome with another. We use present time as a means to experience or really a-experience or directly apprehend action in its entirety.

The Outcome of All Possible Outcomes

Everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen has already taken place. The result of all happenings is a coinciding present moment of the end of all actions, thoughts, and doing. This present moment, as you enter into it you notice, is like some distant resonating gong that was struck long ago in some far distant place, yet a tremendous corridor of eons of time have allowed the air to resonate and reverberate with the single strike of the beater on the gong. This is what the present is: the fulcrum of possibilities, the outcome of all possible outcomes, the dead center of existence in all possible forms.

Spiritual Exercise

I offer you a spiritual exercise. At any moment through your day, simply bring your attention to the present moment. Cease all movement and onward motion, physically, mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Freeze that moment and observe yourself in detail.

Bring your attention to your physical body. Notice tensions, tightness, restlessness, and contraction. Observe thoughts and thinking in their arrested state. See how your bodymind is moving toward something, some end or result, some imagined outcome. Don’t get caught up in what that outcome is, rather stay in the presence of the movement toward the result itself. Notice the flow of your emotions and their relation to desires and restless activity. Notice how your awareness deepens in perfect acceptance of everything that arises from your organism just as it is, without changing anything, without improvement or criticism. Be with yourself just as you are in present time. Observe the rhythm, depth, and quality of your breathing. Feel the edge of your energy body and its crackling movement.

Perfect Acceptance of Yourself

At the beginning of adopting this practice, aim to do this exercise three times during your day for between one and five minutes. As you repeat this exercise, your awareness and acceptance deepens and the insights from your observation become more profound. In time your energy, mental activity, physical and emotional experiences unify and you experience the confluence and harmony of the entire organism in both human and spiritual aspects.

The key to this spiritual exercise is perfect acceptance of yourself in the moment. Do not try to change a thing! Merely observe yourself in consciousness just as you are in present time. Everything is there, nothing is missing, all things will be given to you through spiritual practice.

BLOG entry #62

At times in our psycho-spiritual practice we need to be willing to appear awkward for a time as we reassemble and reacclimatize ourselves to ritual and ceremony, to preciousness and delicacy, and growing sensitivity. We are like little people overwhelmed by truth, divinity, and eternity, but alternatively we are like giants who have become self-inflated, blown up out of proportion, cumbersome and unable to respond to the grace of the sacred delicacy of the Divine.

In a previous period of my life I was a member of a film crew. We were located near a warehouse complex in London’s East End for the filming of Paul McCartney’s movie Give My Regards to Broad Street. This movie panned but it should have been big. It was full of celebrities, super-session musicians. The producer George Martin was there and Dave Edmunds, Eric Stewart and Ringo and Paul from the Beatles. All this at a time when the Beatles reunion (which never happened) was being hotly debated as usual, here was half of the band in a crummy warehouse in a London backwater. Everybody had eyes for the on-set recording of rock’n’roll that was taking place with Martin behind an enormous sound-desk and the supergroup romping through rock standards and old Beatles hits.

But I found myself distracted. Along with the celebrities, pop stars, and pretty actresses assembled there was the wrestler Giant Haystacks. He was seven feet tall, weighed 685 pounds, and was easily the biggest human being I had ever been in a room with. He was so big and heavy that the carpenters had had to take the doors jamb out to widen the entrance and reinforce the old Dickensian wooden floor to accommodate him.

Most of film work is waiting, whether you’re the star actor or a gofer. So I was sitting opposite Giant Haystacks in some awe, imagining what it might to be like to be so impossibly large when he leaned slightly sideways, bent forward, and very delicately retrieving a white paper cup from the floor where it had fallen, straightened up, and gently placed the cup on a little table beside him. I don’t know if he had dropped the cup or if it just happened to be there. What was extraordinary about the act was the delicate way he did it. And of course I could see he had to. Just for a few seconds I felt something of what it must be like to be him, the effort that was needed to execute such a simple task, the mindfulness needed to maneuver his bulk, the necessity of gentleness when from sheer weight, size, and forcefulness you could without thinking break, injure, or damage other people objects the environment around you so easily.

Today, in insensitive times, an era that is closed off to the sacred, we may for a while have to retrieve the white paper cup, learn to humbly lean sideways, bend forward and bring delicacy and exaggerated sensitivity to the retrieval of our souls. Like Gulliver in Lilliput we have become over large, overblown, and many things are out of proportion.

When I see documentary footage of the fakirs and sadhus at the tri-annual meeting known as Khumb Melah, where hundreds of millions of Hindu worshippers assemble for a ritual bathing, I am reminded of Giant Haystacks. The Khumb Mela is the unspeakably large Hindu gathering of holy men and women fakirs and sadhus, many of whom intentionally inflict physical hardships on themselves in the cause of peace or as a gesture of worship—arms held in the air for decades, some who never cease from standing, and others who sew their lips together and exist on liquids. Giant Haystacks was reputably deeply religious and he described himself as a total loner—both arguably qualities of the mystic. His surely was the way of the fakir. An unselfconscious sadhu, Haystacks had chosen—or perhaps it was chosen for him—the spiritual way of awareness of the bodymind, of the fakir overcoming the physical body as a way to God.

BLOG entry #61