Richard Harvey answers questions about his personal retreats.

Why do people need a personal retreat?

There are many reasons—health, relationships, career, personal development, a sense of meaninglessness, lack of purpose, challenges of aging, coping with emotions, anxiety, depression, crisis and spiritual enquiry. Ultimately, I think the retreat event is a sane response to modern existence.

Traditionally, there has been a monastic milieu for people to retire to away from the world and contemplate, relax, refresh and attempt to see the world in a new way. That self-regulatory part of us says sometimes: it’s enough, I need a break, I need time to catch up with myself or to let it all in and concentrate on the inner (and outer) changes that are taking place in my life.

Why not just take a holiday?

Holidays of course bring their own stress, from expectations as well as the projection of desire. In other words we look for amusement out there – the retreat is not about looking for amusement, for further distraction or adding stress. It is more about saying that’s enough, Stop! Letting things settle inside us, taking stock, finding peace or insight.

Is a retreat necessarily spiritual?

A retreat here is as spiritual as you are. From my point of view and the point of view of genuinely spiritual people spirituality is a description of the human core or higher faculties of human existence. It’s not something to swap or conjecture or figure out. In terms of practice it is a route to transcendence and the divine—it’s not optional you see; it is who you are ultimately.

It is not for me to foist that on you. If someone comes here for a retreat with an emotional or developmental issue, I will facilitate and encourage them to be with what‘s happening on their own terms. You don’t have to be a believer!

So an atheist could come on retreat with you?

Oh yes, of course. And you know some atheists are more sincere than believers or so-called spiritual people. It really is more a matter of authenticity and sincerity than believing or having faith in some spiritual way or other. The sincere atheist will do much better than the inauthentic spiritual seeker.

So what happens if I come on a retreat here? Do I just hang out?

No. We have a concentrated schedule of one-to-one therapy work with me, tasks given to deepen in insight and understanding throughout the day, walks, breathing exercises, active dreaming, meditation, physical-emotional exercises, some “just sitting” or being here, plus pleasurable human activities—eating, relaxing and communing with nature.

It all sounds full-on!

Well, to regulate yourself and to ease yourself out of the outward orientation in the outer world you have to busy yourself in a disciplined way. Most of us would have a hard time suddenly being thrown back on inner resources for 24 hours a day. So this is a way of structuring the inner retreat and making it palatable and possible within a short space of time, say, a week. Ultimately everything you’re doing is referring you back to yourself, so it is replenishing.

Would I work on anything I want to in therapy with you or do you have a themes structure, a way of doing it?

Well, both actually! With the introduction of the new retreat accommodation, which is a beautiful self-contained eco-build, I have decided, in addition to the usual retreat where you bring your present, individual issues, to offer three new themed retreats.

What are the themes?

One is The Inner Journey, where you explore where you are in your inner exploration and where you’re going perhaps. You gain some clarity, insights and take another step or so along the way. For some, there may be a breakthrough, which is either a major change or even a transformative movement across the threshold.

Then there’s The Path of Love, a relationships-themed retreat where you explore the dynamics of your relationships, present and past, your emotional behavioral patterning and partnership and friendship dynamics. For some it is an exploration of the path of intimacy, the way of the heart, and its rewards and challenges.

Then there’s a spiritual retreat, Spiritual Life and Sacred Practice, in which we look at your “progress” along the spiritual path, your present spiritual lessons, the state of your spiritual practice, understanding and insight, and level of attainment. For those who have a consistent spiritual discipline, personal retreats are very important as a time of profound in-turning and replenishment.

Finally, I offer The Practitioner’s Retreat for practitioners: therapists, counselors and healers, to look at how they are working with others, what the issues are in their healing practice and strengthening and renewing themselves and giving care and attention to the carer!

How effective are personal retreat?

In ten years of personal retreats, very few have been less than 100% successful. When people leave a retreat here they are satisfied, inspired, refreshed and re-enthused through changes insights and understanding that have arisen in terms of breakthrough and deep process work. Objectively we can assess with clarity through reviewing the stated aims for the retreat and by far those aims and often more have been achieved.

These retreats are unique in my experience. The mix of relaxation and focus, the ambience of the Alpujarras, the quiet profound atmosphere and immersement in nature, reflection and guidance in therapy sessions, freedom and discipline make it a highly beneficial and extraordinary experience.

BLOG entry #160

Who are you really? When everything that’s attached is stripped away, what remains? Who or what is it that you truly are?

We can start this classical, timeless enquiry by answering, “I am not what I do.” (Later “I am not what I have” and “I am not what I appear to be” may join).

What we do casts us into the area of roles. So, let’s look at them. For this you will need a notebook and pen or pencil to hand (I was born in the twentieth century, before keyboards were dominant).

Roles are important in our life. Sometimes so important that we cling to them, as if to a life raft to stop us from drowning. Some years ago in a workshop I met a man called Alan. In the initial sharing that precedes most of my workshop processes, Alan started with, “I am an architect ...” Inner work attracted Alan and after a number of workshop sharings, all begun with, “I am an architect...” I felt the time was right to lift the mask off. So, following the group sharing I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “You are not an architect.” He looked at me quizzically and then, deepening, insightfully, then, deeper still, excitedly ... “and you know you’re not an architect,” I added.

Alan looked at me surprised and grateful, as layer upon layer of conditioning, conformity, expectation, parental wishes and others’ aspirations rolled off him in waves of cathartic energy, crying and trembling. Sorrow and frustration pooled before him and cleared the way for his inner journey to self-knowledge and self-awareness. It was great for him—the “I’m not an architect”—insight. And it was great for me, for it reinforced my confidence and trust—as a therapist, an agent of transformation, you must gauge when it’s the right time to be confrontative and act!

This anecdote illustrates the importance of transcending your roles and not identifying with what you do, because who you are is different to what you do and you fulfill a tremendous variety of roles in your life.

I want you to write down a whole bunch of these roles… let me show you. This is me—well, my roles anyway: father, psychotherapist, retreat organizer and leader, writer, author, cook, domestic cleaner, dog-walker, administrator, hole-digger, driver, shopper, lover, friend, husband, musician…

Now, I didn’t think about this list. I just wrote it down and that’s the way I encourage you to do it ... [Pause for you to write your own list] ...

Now, draw three circles, one in the middle of the page, one around that one and a third encircling the second circle. You now have something resembling a sombrero or a cone with three elevations or levels seen from the top! Re-write your list, this time evaluating each entry, so that the roles you are most attached to, the ones that are most important to you and central in your life (inner life?) are written in the middle circle, the ones you are slightly less attached to are in the second or middle circle and the roles you are least attached to and are least central in your life are in the third or outer circle ... [Pause while you complete this] ...

Next, either in the three circle diagram, alongside it or on a separate piece of paper, if there’s insufficient space, I want you to write in some qualities, some associations with each of your roles. For example, father—duty, material joy, restrictions; psychotherapist—meditation, status, healing role....

Finally, I want you to contemplate the work you have done. First, you have delineated your roles, which are the labels you ascribe to your acts of doing, your enterprise, your achievement-oriented self (or selves). Second, you have graded your roles into three areas of importance and attachment. Third, you have described what each of your roles means to you, which may in time reveal how you are attached to them.

Once you have seen how and why you are attached to your roles you may be able to work at releasing yourself over time, freeing yourself to be yourself and paradoxically you will be even better at what you do. As I often advise people who are looking for a therapist, “Find one who’s not attached to being a therapist (because they will also be attached to your remaining a client)!”

The complement of this work on roles is to sit quietly with yourself. You are a miracle, an individual, an unrepeatable event, existing at a particular point in time, living in a particular location in space. Breathe. Recognize your uniqueness, your glowing individuality, your precious qualities, abilities, talents and essential humanness. There is something beyond roles and appearances, beyond even the individual separate heart. Let it glow and move and experience within you, deeply and totally. Let us not call it spirit. Let us not call it soul or love or bliss or inspiration or peace or truth or contentment, wholeness or unity consciousness, awareness or understanding or insight. Because it is all of these and more.

BLOG entry #159

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. ‘Releasing Yourself From Playing Roles.’ was first published in 2012.

In this article Richard Harvey argues that all forms of popular peddling of spirituality are false from the spiritual perspective.

Q: I don’t believe that the mental activity of therapy really leads to a meaningful and satisfying spiritual life. I believe therapy is an eddy of mental self-absorption and you are less able to let go of your entrapments and break through to the other side? Do you agree?

Richard: Yes, therapy, counseling and healing methods that are exclusively mental can never bring you to meaning or satisfaction, because they are mental. The point is that the means dictates the outcome. So if you want to satisfy the intellect, the mind, the rational self, the way is through talking and mental processes. But this kind of satisfaction will be merely mental, imaginary, a fantasy of real satisfaction, a fiction. It is what it is.

But what about the other extreme, the other possibility? Because if you truly want to fulfill your longing for the divine, the means must incorporate the end and what could that mean? Since you are in search of yourself, your divine self within, then you must adopt a means that is in no way redolent of searching at all, since all searching necessarily distracts you from what is already present in you.

Now people say to me, as you have done, that therapy is incompatible with spirituality. Because therapy supports the ego and spirituality dismisses it. Western psychology wants to create a healthy ego and Eastern spirituality wants to destroy it. Well maybe, but, first, I don’t subscribe to east or west. I subscribe to truth and reality; the rest is imaginary. Second, spirituality has always been psychology and spirituality; it just hasn’t always been made as explicit as I am making it. Look at the wonderful ancient stories in Buddhist, Taoist (see for example “Taos Gift”), Christian and Sufi literature of the individual struggle with the small self toward the divine—what is that if not the role of individual psychology in spiritual practice and discipline?

My compromise in inner work methodology and philosophy is not my preference or imposition on you or anyone else to have to do it a certain way. It is how people need to do it in the present era when ego-processes have become so complex, sophisticated, blatantly deceptive and wily, and predominant in the contemporary psyche. If it were up to me, I would go straight to non-seeking. I would have you close your eyes and enter into a profound silence. I would have you love and celebrate the world in all its forms and be attached to none of them. I would have you merge with the divine with abandon, courage and total surrender. But people don’t want that, or they don’t know that they want it, or they don’t know enough that they want it desperately enough to apply themselves to practice and experience all they need to experience to get through the layers of the spiritual processes.

Most of all, of course, people have become ignorant of the fact that they don’t know that the ego has totally taken over in all areas of life. In all human fields of human endeavor, including both worldly and spiritual aspects, the ego has spread like cancer and humankind is suffering its illness unaware that it is ill.

I have devised The Three Stages of Human Awakening (See outline here) to give you a method, a device and a practice that allows you to move through the realms of the ego-dominated life, to the life of compassion and genuine caring, to the spiritual, transcendent and divine realms of true spiritual practice. This is the meeting of psychology and spirituality of the individual with consciousness and this does give meaning and satisfaction in the fullest sense. It is not merely mental activity. It is most certainly not mental absorption and entrapment. As to breaking through to the other side, there is none, neither is there a special time nor an evolving human development from a spiritual perspective. I would refute these notions today from a spiritual perspective and ask others to join with me in refuting them. Not to incite any conflict but to stand up for concepts and expressions of truth and reality that will disappear if we do not represent them.

The spiritual pertains to eternity, the absolute, the unchanging and undying essence of Self, the truth and reality. Its relation to the outer world is therefore absolute and unchanging too. Any, any, description of the spiritual in terms of modern day events, characteristics and the changing conditions of human beings in time and space is merely a temporary, adaptive reflection of the divine absolute—no more the moon than the moon’s reflection is really the moon. So almost all, without exception, popular peddling of spirituality is false from the spiritual perspective.

So in conclusion, if you want mental rewards practice mentally, if you want superficial rewards practice superficially and shallowly, and if want real, authentic rewards practice genuine spirituality and understand that you must start where all aspiring adepts have started, which is in transcending your attachments to the individual self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-obsessed gross world of materialism, gain, conflict and suffering.

BLOG entry #158

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 Popular Peddling of Spirituality.’ was first published in 2012.

Early last century Gurdjieff expounded his approach to personal and spiritual development—the Fourth Way. He explained that spiritual practice has been followed traditionally in one of three ways. The physical way: to struggle with the body and develop the will by practicing physical exercises to develop attention. The emotional way: to struggle with affection through working with feelings, developing faith and unity, and exercising the will over emotions. The mental way: to struggle with mental habits and capabilities, developing knowledge and the intellect. Gurdjieff called these three ways the way of the fakir, the way of the monk and the way of the yogi. The goal of each way is to “master attention”, which is synonymous with realizing the True Self.

Today the way of the fakir is followed in the Alexander technique, Hatha yoga or Tai Chi; the way of the monk in meditation, spiritual renunciation and monastic life and the way of the yogi in psychoanalysis, spiritual study groups and Advaita Vedanta (in which the mind is used to transcend itself). Each of these approaches has been incorporated into the transpersonal work or mystical approaches of modern times.

But Gurdjieff considered each approach incomplete, because developing the body neglects the emotions and the mind; developing the emotions neglects the mind and the body and developing the mind neglects the body and the emotions. According to Gurdjieff, spiritual attainment through any of these ways leaves aspects of our humanness undeveloped. So how do we fulfill ourselves spiritually without discarding any aspects of our humanness?

Gurdjieff proposes that we can pursue our spiritual path outside of the traditional ways by taking responsibility for our spiritual development, organizing our practice and finding our own way. Rather than accepting spiritual truths, we have to find them for ourselves. We must live our own lives and become our own inner authority.

The Fourth Way was prophetic. Today more people than ever experience a call to follow a spiritual path in the world, rather than outside it. For many the spiritual journey is no longer formally prescribed by an outward authority or pursued in an institutionalized setting; each individual discovers it for his or her self. It is an expression of the emerging intimacy between our humanity and our divinity. We accept responsibility for how we lead our life by choosing the path to our psycho-spiritual unfolding. But, although the contemporary spiritual journey may not conform to a prescribed definition and is practiced outside of established religious tradition, we can still draw on mystical traditions and spiritual wisdom for help, clarification and deepening.

Since much of our understanding of spirituality has come to us via the East, confusion has grown in our minds about adopting the trappings of Eastern religion. While this may be useful and appropriate for some, the reality is that the Eastern mind is very different from the Western mind. This is reflected in the increasing number of individuals seeking liberation through a self-directed path. In spite of our attraction to personal surrender and guru worship, the Western mind is insistent that our spiritual path is our own.

This is more than ever true when you consider the maturation of spirituality today. Western spirituality has been retrieved from its other-worldly associations; the fantastical, magical high of its counter-cultural associations, its love affair with altered states and escape from reality, when Nirvana became confused with Shangri-La. Spirituality has begun to mature in the Western mind and is now understood as an essentially inner process producing individual and collective effects.

Leading a spiritual journey in the world means that we don't have to withdraw and “die to the world”. It may be difficult to have a job and a family, and be part of a worldly community and deal with the profound questions of human and divine nature, time and eternity, love and fear. Traditionally people who wanted to lead a spiritual life retreated to monasteries, convents or ashrams to practice within a prescribed structure of discipline. Since the divine call comes individually, people seek an individual, self-directed path of the spirit. Today the predominant way to practice spirituality is through individual integration, personal wholeness and inner renunciation in the world, rather than retreat and withdrawal from the world. The heart has become the new temple.

BLOG entry #157

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. ‘Gurdjieff and A Spiritual path in the World’ was first published in 2012.

Every now and again it is important to stop ... and look up. Then you will see the looming mystery that lays over all things, some constant, some eternal, some evanescence. I call it the light of Truth. It is a divine glow.

When you experience the Philosovo—the call of the Divine—it is like a call from Truth itself. You drop everything. It is the most urgent command you have ever heard. It is like the cry of a small child you must save from a speeding automobile or the plea of a kitten being savaged by a ferocious dog. Or the story where the cop risks his life to save a suicide and remarks that he couldn’t have lived for one more day if he hadn’t tried to save him.

You drop everything and flee to the call of the Philosovo, because there is no time to waste, because time is merely relative and doesn’t matter much beside the great resonance of eternity. But, more than that, you drop everything because you are compelled through passion, urgency and complete distraction to abandon everything and be only together with and as the divine. There are no words for this, no appendages or accompaniments, only truth, only reality.

Distraction is not something to resist. You have senses and thoughts and emotions. Therefore distraction and engagement are bound to occur toward something. The question is: will you direct it to something that is sustaining, satisfying and ultimately real or will you direct it to something superficial, transient and unreal?

In the world today it seems that people are interested in what is shallow, what is immediately apparently rewarding and ultimately unreal. When it is difficult, involving a struggle of some kind, loss or pain, they shy away from it and seek an easier option. But the easier option is not necessarily the best one. Knowing the Divine is not easy. You need to be involved. You need to go deeply into your innate wisdom, to practice and gain insights and eventually understanding. Familiarity with truth is no easy matter. To live in truth constantly and not just part-time takes application, consistency and discipline. These words are not in themselves necessarily attractive. The popular new paradigm is not to have to try too hard, not to have to necessarily question, perhaps not even to think. As for practice, well that may simply be asking too much; it may be too hard. But what else do you have you to do? If you are involved in truth, if you have heard the Philosovo and if you are filled with a divine longing, always, occasionally or intermittently, there is only one real response, one genuine reply.

That reply is yes with all you heart, soul, body and mind. All of your response must be gathered together in a single act of submission and surrender to the Divine and the act of submission of course is another unattractive notion to the modern mind. We have become a race of individuals. We humans have come to prize our individuality over all else. Our preferences, our opinions, likes and dislikes, prejudices, comfort, self-pride, aggrandizement, ego-feeding, relationships, personal ambitions and desires have displaced all other concerns, even the concern for the divine, real love, wisdom, compassion, selflessness, dignity, honor, reverence and peace…even happiness.

This realm in which we live and breathe and love is a realm of sadness, a realm of loss and heart-break. Everything is dying, everything is ultimately going, leaving, including ourselves and everything we hold dear, as well as everything we hate or are averse to, everything we notice or don’t notice. Sometimes this awareness of the very transience of existence is enough to stimulate the Philosovo, the call to go beyond, the call of Truth. Look up now, just above your friend, your partner, your dog, a tree—anything in this manifest world. The looming light of the transcendent domain of Truth hovers brightly over all things and—here is the wonder!—this light connects all things and transcends all things and relates to the world of maya, samsara, of temporary arising forms as the Divine itself. This earth, the very heaven; this body, the sacrifice, these thoughts and emotions, the cloud of unknowing…just by looking up you see that everything is the Divine.

BLOG entry #156

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. ‘Look Up and See that Everything is The Divine’ was first published in 2012.