Not all that long ago people were prepared to suffer extreme torture rather than renounce their spiritual beliefs. Spirituality has always been intensely provocative and confrontational. Think also of the people who tortured their fellow men. And if you are bewildered by that, consider this: they both had the same stated motivations: to save the souls of, respectively, the tortured, mutilated, martyred heretic and themselves.

Today we live in superficial times. If someone approached you a la an Eddie Izzard sketch and proposed to hack you to death unless you agreed with something you thought silly, you would be hard put to see the point in disagreeing. After all, you’d reason, it’s only words and this guy wants to take my life.

But isn’t there a deeper point here? Have we lost the spiritual sense totally? Today it seems that spirituality is synonymous with pleasure, personal fulfillment, being the best you can be, helping people, being kind. It’s sentimental, idealistic, unreal and unchallenging. What’s happened to the kind of spirituality where the spiritual teacher loved you so much that he was willing to lose your admiration just to teach you a spiritual lesson, where the spiritual friend approached you to tell you something revealing, difficult and potentially hurtful about yourself, because he loved you more than he needed your friendship to survive the confrontation? Where is the modern day couple, married or otherwise, who will are willing to live on the edge of revelation, risk and true love by consistently challenging their partner to awaken, remain open-hearted and be courageous, even more than kind sometimes, or at least to understand that kindness like beauty and compassion is not always a romantic vision in soft focus, because sometimes it must have teeth to really teach and be genuinely human, effective and real?

Two stories come to mind. The first is the monk and the samurai; perhaps you know it? The samurai comes to see the little monk. He’s sitting quietly on the floor meditating naturally and the samurai, huge and intimidating, towers over him and demands, “Teach me about heaven and hell!” The diminutive monk looks up and replies, “Tell you about heaven and hell! I couldn’t teach you anything! You’re dirty! You’ve got a rusty sword! You’re unkempt! You’re a disgrace to the samurai class!” The samurai becomes furious and draws his sword. He is about to chop off the monk’s head when the little monk looks up and quietly says, “That’s hell.”

The samurai is stunned and amazed by the monk’s extraordinary compassion. Realizing that this little man risked his life to teach him a spiritual lesson, he is so affected he bursts into tears of gratitude and wonder and he sheaths his sword. Just then the monk looks up and says, “And that’s heaven.”

The second is a somewhat peculiar story. It has personal significance to me, because my own spiritual teacher hated it. I don’t think he really understood it like I did, partly because he wasn’t as literary or intellectual as I was. This is something I often point out to my own clients, students and seekers: because I am a would-be-scholar, i.e. not really a scholar at all, I have the tendency sometimes to dazzle the less-learned with volleys of impromptu literary religious or spiritual references, provoking the complaint that since I know so much and they can never know as much as me, they will never make it spiritually. This of course is rubbish. The lists of Zen, Sufi, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu etc. spiritual masters and adepts include many illiterate Self-realizers. This is because wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge is acquired, whereas wisdom is innate.

The story is about a beautiful Buddhist nun who provokes the prurient attention of the monks in the monastery and threatens the stability of spiritual practice for the male monks and herself in the process. She selflessly disfigures her face, making herself ugly, so that the members of the community are not distracted and she can apply herself to her Buddhist practices.

My teacher thought this a horrible story and taken literally it is life-negating, likely misogynistic, and very nasty. But surely it is symbolic of a spiritual truth. That truth is that we must turn away from the outward appearances, the dazzling play of consciousness, to become fully aware, engulfed and overtaken by consciousness and incorporated into the divine. This is not to say that the world of appearances and pleasure and so on are evil (we don’t have to fall for that dichotomy), but simply that in the process of awakening and liberation we must turn from the outward life of appearance to enable us to see clearly with inner sight both the inner and the outer, which turn out to be one anyway, although we don’t know that (in the wisdom sense) until we have gone beyond the stage of the spiritual process.

Spiritual practice takes us to our edge. There’s always an edge, a dichotomy in spiritual practice, because you arrive in time at a meeting of worlds, at the border of time and eternity in a moment. Inner and outer, earthly and heavenly, actual and ideal, human and divine—spirituality looks different from here in the world of time, space and relativity, than it does from therein the world of purity, love, wisdom, satchitananda and reality.

We may not have to suffer extreme torture for our spiritual beliefs anymore, but for those of us who experience the divine call, the invitation to unity, and respond passionately it is like being painfully parted from our loved one. We ache, agonize, yearn and long for and pray for unity with the Divinity.

BLOG entry #155

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 Passionate Response to the Call of the Divine’ was first published in 2012.

The psycho-spiritual therapist is a spiritual guide and healer. Is the therapist working for you? No, he is definitely not working for you. He is working with you. This is a joint practice, a sharing, a meeting. He is not the expert, you are the expert. He is not authoritative, although he may speak with authority. He does not ever tell you what you must do (although you may hear it that way), but he may give encouragements, guidance, direction. And yes, at times he will tell you when behavior—yours or another’s—is not alright, is unacceptable, or inappropriate.

Here is a difficult one too. This sharing, this relationship is unequal. As your guide, the therapist necessarily knows more than you. He has traversed the terrain, felt the inside of the dragon’s mouth, crawled over the cut-glass. He has been there. He will hold and contain you; he will provide the presence and the essential emptiness in which you are received ... recognized ... acknowledged and “seen” at last. You will feel amazing relief from this contact, from this connection, but you will struggle and fight against it. Sometimes you and he are polarized, sometimes it is easy between you, sometimes it’s casual, at other times formal. You experience the therapist-guide as distant and close, but you go on regardless. Faith and trust triumph. You will get there, never doubt it.

According to your tendency, the therapist-guide may be a temporary relationship for you. That’s alright. Remember though that if you have a tendency toward serial relationships or if you have a tendency toward single-minded monogamy and loyalty this will be reflected in the therapeutic relationship, because everything is reflected in it. This relationship is like no other; it is the mirror of your soul. And it will end.

When it ends you will feel overwhelming gratitude and respect, honor and reverence. You will look back on it as the way, the path, the means by which you have arrived at the authentic human existence and you will wonder why everyone doesn’t do it! Be accepting of everyone in their limitations, in their ignorance. While you don’t want to become a boring evangelist, you will want to find a way to express, to give back, to represent what you have discovered and to bring the sacred treasure of illumination into the community of souls you number among your friends, family and wider network. Surrender to the artistic impulse to express through your life, in your creative expressions, in your home, your relationship, work and family. Bring it in, be proud of it and yourself, and share it generously.

You find yourself now on the peaks of wisdom, on the precipice of intuition, on the mountain-tops of compassion. Knowledge and cleverness mean less to you—much less—than wisdom and direct, inner knowing. Quoting, referring to others’ wisdom, scholarship and knowledge per se mean less to you now. Poised on the edge of a breakthrough now I am sure you feel scared…underneath you are terrified. You want to hold on and want to let go. You want to argue and you want to accept. You want to fight and you want to surrender. Trust. All will be well.

BLOG entry #154

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. ‘Psycho-Spiritual Psychotherapy and Spiritual Teaching: A Fragment of A Letter to A Spiritual Seeker Poised on The Edge of A Breakthrough’ was first published in 2012.

The skills that enable a counselor or therapist to engage with another person effectively are innate human skills which can be practiced by any individual who is interested enough to find out what they are and practice getting good at them.

A friend asked me the other day, "Isn't it strange that we have to go to a counselor or therapist to talk about our troubles?" This innocent question, hardly thought about anymore when you have been a psychotherapist for as long as me, made me think. People used to talk to each other and perhaps they were effective, because people used to simply care about each other. What if professionalization, which is only a phenomenon of the last one to two hundred years, has taken that away from people?

This has inspired my desire to impart counseling skills to you in this short article. Of course a lot of this information is available elsewhere, but usually it's described in therapy jargon that the average person wouldn't understand.

So, here's my first attempt to rectify the imbalance, to give back what may have been taken away from you, the basic human ability to care and put it into action when another person needs your time and wants to talk to you.

What are these skills?

First, inner space. To engage with another person you must have some inner space available to receive them. This means that your own problems are not so pressing that you are constantly distracted or that you are not so worried about some impending disaster that you cannot concentrate. Create inner space inside yourself through regulating your life, be aware that everything you do may lead to consequences that consume your time and your attention. Try to plan and act in a way that leads to your desired result, rather than allow life to run you.

Second, sensitivity. You should be able to watch carefully and be aware of how the other person is and what they may need through their behavior and other signals. For example, if the person you are with is withdrawn don't scrape your chair when you sit down, lower your voice to convey a feeling of quiet safety and don't expect them to look you in the eyes. Try to be aware of how the person comes across and respond in a way that lessens the distance between you.

Third, listening. Listening is a skill with many levels of functioning. If you think about it, it's true. You can listen with your ears as everybody knows, but can you listen with your heart too. Listening with your heart to another person means feeling along with them and sharing in their emotional experience. Often just before some expression of feeling a compelling wave of unmistakable emotion will surge up within them and you can be sensitive to that when you listen with your heart.

These three skills: inner space, sensitivity and listening will be enough for you to really be with another person and help effectively. They are a very good foundation for actively caring for another. Just one more thing though. People want to talk and be heard. Don't be too quick to problem-solve or intervene in any way. You may feel the impulse to do something about it (particularly if you're a man!), but just don't. If you practice the skills I have been describing here patiently and consistently and you give the other person the experience of being thoroughly heard, chances are that they will figure it out for themselves and that's a wonderful experience for you, as a lay counselor - you allow the other person to find, from their own inner resources, the way through their troubles.

BLOG entry #153

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. ‘Counselling Skills That Enable You To Really Help: How To Be With Another Person Effectively’ was first published in 2012.

The problem with forgiveness is that we want too much too soon. Strictly speaking that's not forgiveness's problem, it's a human failing. You see forgiveness, when you engage with it as a process, rather than an event, has a lot to teach us about blame, anger and guilt.

Let's start with the inevitable offense. Someone or something is going to happen or has happened already (or both) to cause offense. That offended feeling depends very much on your sense of self-pride and possibly self-esteem. In any case some personal identity intercepts a wandering act that seeks forgiveness and clutches it to itself! "I have been wronged," is the sense, the feeling and, very likely, the verbal declaration.

"X had done this to me," "It's awful," or "How could she?" "What was he thinking of?" "How could he?" You are only too familiar with this in your own and others' lives, I am sure. If you could retreat for a minute from the drama, which is imbued with emotion, evocative of justice, saturated in how-can-we-combine-in judgment-and-retribution-to-put-the-world-right-again, you will see what everything is hinging on; yourself. Without this vulnerable, because offended, sense of yourself, your identity, who you are, no offense could take place.

From this sense of self-importance then, blame arises. Think for a second, blame cannot arise without a sense of self, because it is comparative. Blame is comparative because the blamed person stands in contrast to the one who is blaming. What sense of self-righteousness is it that allows us to feel blame toward someone and avoid the fact that we are not blameless?

Blame is the removal of something we don't like about ourselves onto somebody else. Particularly when they give us an excuse through their actions to do that! We are all surely blameworthy... about something. Everyone has something to be ashamed of, don't they?

What can we do rather than blame? Well, we could help, we could try to love and understand and empathize and be insightful and wise. We could share these positive qualities with the other person, rather than kick them when they're down. We could, through identifying with them as ourselves, see that their shaming and diminution does not in any way reflect positively back on us. We are each one of us part of the human race and ultimately the shame is shared. However we apportion it we have to carry our share of the burden of being human - the degradation and the glory.

Anger presents a similar avenue of fruitful exploration. Anger at the first level is defensive, because it tends to conceal genuine emotions. This is confusing, because everyone thinks of anger as an emotion. But emotions are not necessarily authentic and, more than any other, anger masks the genuine emotion and this is widespread in the emotional expression, or lack of it, in the modern world.

Frustration, irritation, annoyance - there are apparently endless permutations of anger. Some are so common we hardly even notice them, let alone feel the need to empathize with them or take them seriously enough to heal them. But they are insidiously powerful in their overall negative effect, eroding your emotional, physical, mental and spiritual well-being, leading to depression, chronic resentment, isolation and even self-harming and suicide.

No one knows when and how exactly, but at some point in human history, anger became a habit, a deeply ingrained habit, an acceptable mode of behavior and, like any bad habit, it can be broken; it can be transcended. You can beat it, through awareness. See how, what, when and why you are habitually angry. Stand back just a little from the action, from the drama and watch yourself keenly. When you discover exactly how the process of anger manifests in you, then you will be ready to take the next step. "I get angry rather than... ?" Fill in the dots and you will be ready to take responsibility for your choice. I hope you choose something new.

Guilt is a sticky one. Guilt is the assumption of responsibility, the impossible assumption for some supposed flaw, a fault in you that took on the culpability for some negative outcome in your world. What gives you the right to feel guilty? The supposed sense of self we considered right at the beginning of this article.

Did you ever read the poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, the wonderful poem where we or God or collective humanity (I'm not sure which) is appealing to you to call it by its real names. The poem evokes the lily pad and the butterfly, the tiny bird and the caterpillar. Then this awful scenario drops in, where a sea pirate rapes a young refugee girl who throws herself over the side of a boat and drowns. We are invited to identify with, to sympathize with and to somehow include not only the poor young girl, but the pirate too. There is no place for guilt in the sentiments of this poem, only inclusion, only acceptance, only love.

Forgiveness comes about in its own time. Please make a place for it in your inner garden. Prepare the ground, welcome it when it arrives and be ready for the great responsibility it brings. But please don't rush it and don't settle for a counterfeit version of it. The road to forgiveness is unrepeatable. It is unforgettable. It is totally necessary. You will be the richer for traveling on it and when you reach your destination, you will be loving, accepting and free.

BLOG entry #152

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. ‘Forgiveness—Blame, Anger and Guilt: The Patient Path to Acceptance, Love and Freedom’ was first published in 2012.

In primary love relationships—marriage and partnerships—there are three possible stages. These stages are progressive and sequential; you must pass through one to get to the other. Although most of us are stuck in the first stage, to achieve your full life potential you should try to experience all three for the deepening degrees of happiness and fulfillment they offer.

Have you noticed how unhappy people seem to be today in their relationships? Everyone you meet seems to be dissatisfied, discontented, unhappy. We have euphemisms for the series of events that inevitably seem to lead to the relationship breakup: "She and he are going through a hard time just now," "She says she need some space from the marriage," "He's always working late at the office."

Plus we tend to be judgmental about our friends when they enter into a new relationship. More euphemisms: "He's not good enough for her," "I don't know what he sees in her," "They make a very strange couple."

Or critical. Euphemisms again: "I think they deserve each other," "What an ugly pair," "He deserves all that she gives him (sarcastically)," "I don't know why they stay together."

The only ideal couples are the actor and celebrity ones - and this in a week when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are breaking up (no surprise there) and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are not (big surprise there) - but then again, they are actors of course!

In the real world of ordinary, emotional, physical, flawed, vaguely neurotic, sensitive and insensitive, actual individuals, the Beatles and Le Morte d'Arthur comprise the philosophy we live by. Whether we know it or not. So, when John Lennon sings, "Love is the answer" or when we, in dreams both waking and sleeping, meet the partner of our dreams we are embarking on a preordained, archetypal journey into love. But love has three distinct levels or stages in the full human experience.

These three stages are self-love, love of another and, finally, spiritual love, and this is what this article is about.

The first stage is the one in which relationships show you yourself. This is true whether you are aware of it or not. This is why marriage and partnerships do not have a good success rate. We think that relationships are fun, the partner an object of desire, and that pleasure and satisfaction can only follow. Some or all of this may be true, but far more potent and relevant than all these is the mirror the relationship holds up in front of you. People do not like to see themselves. They shy away from the accurate reflection. When your partner tells you how moody you are, or how impossible to live with, or nasty, unforgiving, or insensitive you are, your first thought is to leave the relationship. Preposterous though this may sound, isn't this why relationships usually finish? We don't like what we are seeing in ourselves.

The way to approach relationships is as a learning experience, learning about ourselves so that we can grow in awareness and insight about ourselves and, over time, become more the person we would like to be, less reactive, controlling and controlled, less subject to automatic impulses and more liberated, awake and expansive, more loving, happier and more fulfilled.

The second stage is the one in which relationships help you to grow in love. Once you have got over yourself and your repressed emotions and unfinished business, you have some inner space for the person you're in the relationship with. Time to be with them, to listen to them, to act selflessly sometimes and to love them. One of the primary functions of love in outward expression is to give time. When you love somebody you find that you have time for them. And you want to spend time - quality time - together. As you learn to relate more deeply to your partner, you find that your heart expands and you feel the flow of love within you. Loving is a circular flow, irresistible and endless, and the more you love your partner or spouse, the more love you have available for yourself, for others and for the world about you.

The third stage is the one in which you live as companions in God or your Divine nature. It bears repeating that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. You don't have to wait for time to convince you of this. Although as you age, it will become more apparent to you. In middle years and old age (even within this predominantly pro-youth culture) you increasingly orient yourself to the immaterial world and your approaching demise. The spiritual, inner world becomes more real for you and your relationship to the spiritual backdrop and forms in which you live and exist become more central to your life. You are growing in love, knowledge, and inevitably, wisdom.

If you are fortunate enough to have a loving relationship and a life companion alongside you, you look with the eyes of the Divine upon him or her and you celebrate your partner, along with all the other gifts of this divine world. Passing through the spiritual and transcendent realms of truth and reality, you turn your face to God, to the Divine, together.

These are the deepening stages of love in marriage and partnership.

BLOG entry #151

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. ‘Love Relationships, Marriage, Partnerships: The Three Essential Stages of How to be Happy Together’ was first published in 2012.