In the modern era we might be forgiven for taking a backward glance at traditional spiritual practices and meditation and asking whether they have been effective in bringing people to personal liberation and spiritual enlightenment.

On the face of it, they seem to have failed spectacularly. How many people today are enlightened? How many are still trying? Shall we try some more modern practices? Some that are adapted to the contemporary milieu we find ourselves in and which may lead us further into contemplation and toward peace and tranquility... at the very least?

First, try the luminous acceptance exercise. Actively allow everything to be just as it is. Take a minute to engage with what-is. What-is means tuning into sounds and sights, smell and feelings, the touch of the air on your skin, your thoughts, emotions, bodily systems and organs, as they are happening right now in this moment. Perfectly accept, invite and approve it all - all of it! - exactly as it is. Just a few minutes of this exercise and you begin to feel the luminosity of perfect acceptance.

People will say to you that nothing is perfect and they may say to you that seeing this luminosity is illusory. I say always strive for the impossible and everything is already luminous. You just have to realign to perfection now long enough to bring it into your natural awareness.

Notice how negativity and depressed energy habitually dull your finer spiritual senses to the light. The luminosity was always there, ever-present. Now you have seen it, remain aware of it all the time.

Second, try the ego-erasing exercise. The ego is truly a fantasy, a fiction. No one has ever produced one for inspection. It remains as elusive as the Loch Ness monster or the God particle in quantum physics (!). Every day commit yourself to one thing that challenges your ego-self. Do it without reaction or emotional charge. You don't have to be vindictive toward something which doesn't really exist!

For example, do something you really don't want to do, on purpose. Pick up some rubbish from the street in full view of passers-by. If you can think of nothing else, your fallback practice is bowing or prostrating yourself (you can do this in private), because it is very hard to take yourself seriously, let alone feel self-important or egocentric, when you are lying face-down on the floor.

Third, try the unity exercise. Your mind separates and divides... absolutely everything. This is not how things are. Actually everything is one single unity, a unified whole. This is the spiritual lesson 101. This is how you can qualify in it. Relax, relax your senses, relax your body, relax your mind. Now wherever you are, experience everything without division, distinction, discrimination of any kind, drop preferences, identification, opinion, bias, prejudice, marginalization, judgment or criticism.

Slowly the world about you will merge and the experience of unity will flood into you. This doesn't have to take any time (please don't fall for that one!). The real state of existence simply is. It's simply present, only waiting for your awareness to meet it. Breathe, relax, witness... and you are here... you are present... you are all that you see... and all that you see is you.

Please practice these three exercises - the luminous acceptance exercise, the ego-erasing exercise and the unity exercise - and help take some of the mystification out of spirituality. It is your birthright to be spiritually enlightened.

BLOG entry #150

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. ‘How to Reach Spiritual Enlightenment: Three Steps in Spiritual Practice for Modern Life.’ was first published in 2012.

That wonderful old matriarch of Jungian psychotherapy, Marie-Louise von Franz, used to say that Western civilization put a little gnome on every woman's shoulder to tell her that she's wrong, that her work's no good and that she's worthless.

The nature of woman is always at odds with the male-oriented world. The naturalness of women is in the expression of their true nature in a milieu where that is considered threatening and heretical to conventional values.

In recent decades various schools of thought have arisen which comprise the women's movement. The different feminisms range from the radical philosophies of the feminist separatists to the watered-down feminism made popular by the mainstream media, which has done its best to weaken the revolutionary voice of true feminism.

True feminism confronts the appalling and horrendous history of the suppression and persecution of women over the last two to three thousand years. The legacy of shameful events, such as the systematic persecution and genocide of women healers and herbalists as witches over hundreds of years, remains with us today in the continued treatment of women, and by association children, as inferior beings.

There are no complete records of the numbers of women who were killed as witches. However, in Matilda Joslyn Gage's book, Woman, Church and State (2nd ed; New York: Arno Press 1972, p.247, edition first published 1893) we have this startling estimate: "It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484, or during a period of 300 years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation. The greater number of this incredible multitude were women."

Felix Morrow, in the foreword to Montague Summers's The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1971, p. viii.), tells us that, "The figures of scholars estimating the numbers of witches put to death vary enormously, from 30,000 to several million and it is really impossible to know, given the records of the times, but it is clear that substantial numbers were put to death."

Here's one of the most recent statements I can find regarding the persecution of witches during the most intensive period, i.e. the 16th to 18th centuries: "Over the entire duration of the phenomenon of some three centuries, an estimated total of 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed."

It is as if some reduction in the estimation has been agreed upon and over time the previously alleged figures which are comparable with the Jewish Holocaust have been reduced to a figure comparable to annual car crash fatalities (in the USA) or junk food associated deaths (in the UK).

Is this a conspiracy, a result of misguided cynicism or merely a case of time heals all wounds?

Curiously, the Holocaust of World War II has a second parallel with the persecution of witches. The figure commonly given is eleven million, but that figure is considered far too low.

In spite of the alleged progress toward equality of the sexes, women continue to be insidiously denied a place in society. In concept and treatment, women still suffer from the lack of credit and acknowledgment, and continue to suffer subjugation and violence all around the world in a variety of ways in different cultures.

These cultural mores are reflected in the lives of individual women in the total separation of themselves from virtually all that is natural, intrinsic and innately female. For a woman to discover her true self she must step outside the normal parameters of everything she has learnt to accept and be defined by.

Patriarchal society needs to open to new paradigms and hand over as much of the leadership as is humanly possible to women. The whole conceptual structure of our lives must be transformed and handed over to the female principle in both women and men. Finally we need to return the power the patriarchy stole from women, as Mary Daly put it -the power of naming.

BLOG entry #149

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. ‘Feminism, Woman’s True Nature, Persecution and Subjugation: Restoring the Female Principle’ was first published in 2012.

STEP1: Each day write down one thing you noticed about yourself. If it's an insight all the better, but anything will do and every day doesn't have to be a breakthrough day. Over time you will compile a substantial body of personal information in your inner work notebook. Reflect on the fact that your personality must be finite, after all it lives in the realms of time and space. Every authentic remark and insight into your character is a step toward self-knowledge.

STEP 2: Watch yourself in social situations, when you're alone, at work, in your primary love relationship and all the other environments, relationships and circumstances in which you act and function. We tend to behave differently according to where we are and who we are with. Your personality is rich and diverse. There are so many sides to you. Sometimes you forget parts of yourself; sometimes you neglect certain parts and over-indulge others. This exercise will help you to get in touch with all parts of yourself and work toward integration and wholeness.

STEP 3: As human beings we are always in one of three realms. Awake, asleep or dreaming. Now examine each one and study, compare and consider each one to see what you can learn about yourself. Look also at the borders. The borderline between waking and sleeping, for example, is an extraordinarily potent time for accessing the unconscious. Enter into this with the excitement of new adventure and be open to new discoveries. By the way, stop calling the waking experience your "real life." Dreams have a reality of their own and since you will spend a substantial amount of your life in the dream world give it recognition and respect, because it also is real.

STEP 4: Self-observation is far harder than observing others, probably because it's less challenging than observing ourselves and because we have become predominantly visual in our experience of the world. But this doesn't mean that observing others is necessarily unhelpful to your inner work practice. So, observe others. Choose someone at a party, in the street or at work and see how much you can learn about them through witnessing their body posture, their speed, their tone of voice, walking gait, functionality, general attitude. Do they speak using visual imagery, mental abstractions or touchy-feely terminology? This will tell you a great deal about them. How do they react with others? Privately compile a set of information, a profile of them, until you have insights that are way beyond a glancing acquaintanceship. Now, the testing time: can you do the same with yourself?

STEP 5: Background assumptions and wallpaper beliefs are your moral suppositions, guiding principles and taken-for-granted expectations. They are like the water we swim in or the air we breathe. Make them conscious. They were communicated to you by parents, teachers and authority figures, in domestic, educational and societal settings in your early life. They dictate your attitude to time, money, love, ambition, action, relationships, success and failure, and happiness. Bringing them to conscious awareness over time allows you to reconsider and make new empowered choices.

STEP 6: What do you do? What do you want? and What if your life purpose? For many of us there is a disparity between these three aspects of life. Can you see that, when they are in alignment and in correct proportion to each other, balance and success must surely ensue? Make a chart: list your actions - working, relaxing, watching TV, reading, spending time with your family. List your needs and desires - I want to make money (how much?), I want to create a loving family environment, I want to learn to play a musical instrument. Finally, write down or explore your life purpose. Now, as you do this you will start to notice discrepancies; things you want that you don't allow yourself the time for, doing too much of this and not enough of that, procrastination, unreal expectations. Once you get the full picture, you may want to change it.

STEP 7: One of the most life-changing questions is, "What do I honor?" So, I ask it of you now. Spend a little time on it each day. Once you have refined your answer and it is accurate, heart-felt and true for you, live it everyday and make it your priority and the central theme of your life

BLOG entry #148

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. ‘Know Yourself: Seven Steps to Self-Awareness’ was first published in 2012.

Richard Harvey answers questions about the future of psychotherapy and spirituality in the present era.

Are you critical of the world of psychotherapy?

Yes, I am. The developments of the last twenty to thirty years have been woeful and the result is that we do not have the quality of practice and practitioners that we need or deserve.

What’s wrong with psychotherapists today?

Let me say first of all that there are many excellent practitioners in the field. But in general the problem with practitioners today are, first, that they haven’t understood the very basic issue that as a therapist you must want to put yourself out of a job. You must work with your clients toward balance and wholeness and bring them into the present whenever you can, so that they don’t need you anymore. This is vital. But the impulse to help becomes converted into the identification with yourself as healer and when this happens everyone is lost, because there are no healers, in the strict sense of the word, only healing. Your inner emptiness enables healing to come through you.

The second thing is that so much psychotherapy and psychotherapy training suffers from a short-sighted approach and meets the client’s desire to feel better. People need to understand that feeling better is a very small amount of the total capacity of the therapeutic inner journey. If we convey a new paradigm of personal health and well-being that includes the universal requirement to fulfill the personal inner journey, to find out who you are as a common practice, something that everybody does, and remove the stigma of the therapy label that attracts the judgment and pity of others who assume a superior position, then we can begin to embrace life as an adventure in the inner and outer worlds, an adventure that draws us back into innate wisdom, authenticity, creativity and finally real spirituality.

What do you mean by “real” spirituality?

Spirituality today has become largely identified with sentiment, displays of affection and care, political sensibility, and most of all personal travail. The need to be liberated from our personal limitations is not the same as spiritual liberation. But the two have become so mixed up in the modern world that the truth of transcendence and the divine is likely to be lost altogether.

Therefore, although it’s not a popular stance and you may lose friends doing it, you have to speak up in the face of blatant nonsense and subtle, surreptitious manipulations of truth through popularization, commercialization and superficiality and declare that authentic spiritual truth is being eclipsed by emotional, personal, exalted experiences and sentimental notions.

Real spirituality is in you. It is the truth. It is found through courageous and powerful application of your heart and soul to the life of the spirit, to the great discovery of divinity inside yourself. That truth transforms everything. It is not sentimental, egoistic, imbalanced, questionable, or open to dispute. It is the reality of the Absolute within you and pervading all things. This world is a fleeting, changing world of temporary, adapting forms, arising and subsiding, being born and dying, climaxing and subsiding. The best you can say of it is that it is a reflection of the truth and as you grow in spiritual awareness you enter into Consciousness (or God, or the Divine) and manifest it here in the relative world of time and space and the world transforms before your eyes.

That’s incredible. You seem to be able to speak of things most of us find heard to even think about. What is the essence of your work?

To liberate, to transcend and to reveal that the world of appearances is not the real world.

How do personality and character fit into this?

They don’t, but then again personality and character are not permanent fixtures, you see? They are not the truth, just changing phenomena.

Don’t you have to find that out for yourself?

Yes, in the cultural West ego forces have become so strong, we always think that we have to do it for ourselves, because we have lost any fundamental sense of trust. We think everything is taking us for a ride! That’s the personal issue here. The deeper spiritual issue is that we have also lost the ability to surrender or respond and that’s a spiritual tragedy.

In the eastern mindset, for example, the possibility remains to this day that the spiritual teacher, the guru, turns up and states a couple of fairly simple statements and that’s that; you do it and everything’s transformed! You just don’t get that kind of trust from the western mind and you never did. It is cultural. In the west we have got to do it for ourselves, got to test it when we’ve found it out; we have to put our hand in the wound.

What makes your psycho-spiritual approach different from the mainstream, and effective?

I don’t know. I care and I enter into your experience. I resonate with you. I find something in me that’s like what you’re talking to me about. I don’t react; I respond. I empathize. I am present. I am there. I am not distracted. I am responsive. I laugh. I am natural, I don’t try to impress. I don’t need to force or make anything happen. I am no longer seeking the outcome, the healing, the result. I meet you. I am together with you. I don’t shy away from pain; neither do I gravitate toward it. I listen. I hear. I am aware. I do not obstruct the natural process of healing. I do not fear you. I don’t need you to have a problem.

In my training too these are the kinds of qualities I encourage students and practitioners to find in themselves and when they have found them to practice and cultivate them.

What’s the future for psychotherapy and spirituality?

I hope for two main outcomes. One, the acceptance of human awakening as a fact and a commonplace occurrence for the human race. Everyone should have the opportunity to awake to their true self, to lead an authentic life of joy and love and to practice spiritually to transcend the small self and live a life of devotion to the divine. Two, the de-professionalizing of counseling and psychotherapy, so that people can re-own and embrace the activities of caring, listening, wise guidance and mentoring. This is crucial. Along with many of the ills of the last one to two hundred years has been the growth of professionalization and commerce, basically status and greed. Developing urbanization, commercialism, industrialization, the growth of mass media and information technology has taken more from us than we realize—almost everything.

Music, for example, used to be an activity you were involved in; you danced, you sang, you played an instrument, you participated. Now we treat music like TV and pay to go to a stadium to watch our favorite celebrity artist play, while we sit there listening a vast distance away. That’s crap, but it’s hard for us to see now, after the slow deterioration of the human spirit that has taken place during our lifetime, what is really wrong with it. Counseling skills, which are merely natural human abilities to heal, music, medicine, leisure, health, creativity, art, drama, celebration, eating, drinking and home life—everything!—need to be brought back to us, to the hearth, to the heart of the community where people can feel them again. Not just pay to have it, but participate in bringing it about.

There is a poverty of spirit today that is beyond the awareness of most people by far and the great tragedy is that if this persists we could lose the life of the spirit forever. It will move into the realms of fantasy and legend, where it is largely already.

To return the healing, therapeutic skills and validate them in people we desperately need intelligent, quality training and deep understanding from students and practitioners of healing and therapy professions—people who are willing to see further than personal gain and status, and the approval of society.

What happened? How was the natural ability to heal, psychotherapy, medicine, health etc. taken away from ordinary people?

The extraordinarily dedicated violent persecution of women as witches, healers and herbalists over hundreds of years is preeminent in the suppression. This systematic genocide, outrageously perpetrated in the name of religion, can possibly bear comparison with the Jewish Holocaust. The highly complex societal, religious and economic forces are a study in themselves, but in summary I think we can see with certainty that the outcome for humanity of the declining quality of inner life through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been to progressively disempower people in a myriad of ways.

Do you think we should return to the golden era?

You can never return to any era. The time is now. And no, I don’t encourage sentiment and idealization about the good old days. I am mostly concerned with the inner life of the spirit, the life journey inherent in a human life, the flowering of the individual soul and Self-realization.

What changes do we need in contemporary society to bring this about?

A truly spiritual revolution, an upheaval in consciousness of collective humanity, human beings ascending into the heart chakra, heart energy becoming the new center of awareness and basis for action. Sociologically, a complete revision of our notion of aging, the understanding that age progresses through developmental stages and that old age yields the role of elder and wise mentor, a deepening general understanding of infancy, early childhood and adolescence which we can then meet profoundly, morally and spiritually with wise mentoring and primary love relationships taken out of the absurd and well-worn mould of the romantic mythology they are stuck in.

Most of all, the understanding, custodianship and recognition of real unengaged inward spiritual, transcendent and divine conditions, respected, honored and given reverence by collective humanity in such a way that we are guided, advised and educated from the highest conscious states that are available to us in our worldly existence.

BLOG entry #147

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Interview on the Future of Psychotherapy and Spirituality in the Present Era’ was first published in 2012.

I.

I was thinking back in a session with someone the other day to the time when I came across the strange beings with whom I finally found a sense of belonging, a sense of homecoming. It was in the 1970s, last century, and I had stumbled into a milieu of what was then known euphemistically as the new therapies—body-orientated, holistic, non-intellectual, cathartic, expressive therapy approaches—that had both immediate and long-term results and which for some were the way forward to a sane world, or even the liberation and saving of the world itself.

So I ran into this “movement”, as it became known, and immediately what attracted me was fear. Fear was attractive to me; it wasn’t so much masochistic as challenging, exciting, real. I had appeared out of a dead environment. Anyone my age growing up in the kind of post-war, 1950s atmosphere could smell the cheapening of life. We had organic vegetables and homemade everything. But we were excited about ice-cream, confectionery and shop-bought cakes. We were bewitched and hypnotized by motor cars, which were just becoming available to the common man, by the possibility of vacationing and, the devil itself, black and white TV!

Whether we still would have been absent without the memories of war experience, war dead, war trauma, and the irresistible opportunities of upward class mobility (bettering ourselves!), I don’t know. Perhaps there have always been reasons why human beings don’t relate to each other. But we were distinctly absent, un-relating and unresponsive. Absence appeared at the dining-table where we all supposedly gathered as a family, in the living room (TV), and on day trips (newspaper, pub and sleeping for the adults—lone play for the kids). Lack of responsiveness and vibrant relationship was ubiquitous. We didn’t look speak, feel, interact in any real way. I think we were being indoctrinated into a kind of Stepford Wives lifestyle. Were people guilty about two world wars, ashamed of their complicity in the events of tremendous violence, or did they feel that they deserved some kind of la-la existence after the horrors of conflict and the barbarity of human beings had been thrust so brutally in their faces, insinuated so deeply into their lives?

Lack of relationship was so much the norm, the prevailing ethos of family life (mine and everyone else’s) that it wasn’t until I read in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book the words, “A child who is not cared for or cared about is abandoned” that it finally occurred to me that I had been abandoned. The smiling photos at the beach, the family group snapshots, the forced jamming together at the Christmas table told a lie; this wasn’t how it was or how it had been. Most of the time—really all of the time—everyone was turned off. But I wasn’t.

I remember suffering a nameless pain, a restless churning disease of the soul that I had no name for, an inner sense of such utter neglect that sometimes I thought it preferable to be anywhere but here, in this life. Later I discovered that this, like so much childhood experience, is not exclusive, not even personal in the strict sense of the word. It was shared experience, participated in by so many others.

By the time I was seven I was terrified… of what I might do… of what was inside me and unacknowledged, unrecognized by me and everyone else… and for me the only escape seemed to be death. But in a vivid experience of invisible and pervasive indoctrination the Christian concept of hell filled with me with more terror than the prospect of remaining alive. I reached out to relatives, to the church, to no avail, without getting what I needed. My need of course was unknown. I wanted a response, but I didn’t know what response I wanted and what I wanted responding to. It was a Kafka-esque, impossible, tragic, futile endeavor, without a name, without a purpose, but filled with purposefulness and redolent of the name of all things.

I paled. I grayed. I turned into colorlessness. I conformed. Or at least I tried very hard. Part of my conformity was conforming to being a rebel. The shadow of the conformist is a conformist nonetheless. And my identification with the rebel self became my sense of belonging. I was naturally outside, cast out, scapegoated, wild, abandoned, untouchable, marginal, irrelevant and within the pale invisibility of this world, I could function as I pleased. This is the wonderful resourcefulness of the person who feels that he or she does not belong: to create an invisible milieu to live in, to create in and, if you’re lucky, to flourish in quietly, resisting detection.

I was in my early twenties when I stumbled into the new therapy milieu so unexpectedly. The deep, hidden, now almost entirely forgotten and most certainly suppressed desire of my earlier life surfaced, rallied, took courage and came pouring out of me like a stream meeting a river, like the river teeming into the ocean. That rare milieu of transparency, honesty, openness, empathy, understanding, insight, inner power, centeredness, innate wisdom, profound relaxation, acceptance and ultimately love was the tangible proof that I had arrived in the place where I had left my dreams so many years before. My dreams now took root in the fertile soil of positive, life-filled existence, in that place where hell and heaven meet, where I set foot with you on this earth.

Thank you for being in this place, thank you for joining me here, let us know more, learn more, grow more and be here together. Let us learn to share and be together in the great heart, the great soul and ultimately in the divine person.

II.

This word responsible poses problems for some. It implies duty and burden, and by extension, guilt and expectation, so there doesn’t seem to be much to recommend it. But in those early “movement” days (see above), we talked about the ability to respond freely, humanly, genuinely, to not merely react. If you were free of emotional-behavioral patterns, the “script”, the restrictive loop-tapes of your life, you could open and respond in freedom.

Somebody has said to me that I cannot justify the claim that you cannot follow an individual path to enlightenment. Another person has said that is what people do anyway and it is about levels of evolving consciousness. But consciousness is not evolving; consciousness is. We cannot conceive of living as consciousness. We cannot even conceive of living in consciousness. And they are different. If we are serious about spirituality, we must become open, available and responsive to the spiritual. You cannot do that if you are contracted within the ego-processes; neither can you do it if you are “evolving in consciousness”, because evolving is just another word for seeking, for journeying, for never arriving. It gives you the ultimate excuse.

In my early days as a group leader I met a man much older than me in one of my workshops. In the initial sharing he said, “I’m Alex and I have been meditating for sixteen years, but I have never had an enlightenment experience.” I remember now the profound sadness that filled the space between us, the deep futility, the pointlessness and his restless, inevitable loyalty to the endeavor that seemed to say, “If I just meditate a bit harder, a little but harder… If I miss the next meditation course, I may miss the great event, the one I have been striving for and working toward for so long.”

I was young then. It hadn’t occurred to me that seeking was itself the problem, the last play of the ego when confronted with futility and vain pointlessness. I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know how to express it and this man was much older than me, a western sadhu looking back at his wasted life and unable to let go, while I was looking forward to a life of fruitfulness and glory, of ecstasy and healing. Of this I had no doubt whatsoever. What was it that this man lacked?

He could not respond. He knew only effort. He knew loyalty, attachment, hard work, striving and progress. He knew how to be industrious and engage in personal endeavor and enterprise with resourcefulness and persistence. He had taken all these righteous human qualities and applied them to spiritual practice. But it would never work. It was merely the last bastion of resistance to transformation and awakening, the conventional small self’s final excuse, the ego’s last desperate attempt at providing an alibi.

So, response: let’s start with the basics. Can you come into a room with awareness? See what you have felt and feel what is happening in the room? Can you sit at a table, eating, drinking, talking, laughing and remain in full consciousness? Can you look into another’s eyes without flinching, without defensiveness, without any other feeling other than full acceptance? Can you remain awake throughout your day? Always present, always participating, always here and now? Many of these are psychological exercises, not even spiritual, mainly exercises to focus fully and correct our limited attention span and human distractedness.

Only when you have deepened in your human experience of life by responding to everything, are you ready to begin the spiritual practice of responding to the divine.

Years ago I sat with a visiting relative. I looked at her, excited, present, curious. She looked back at me briefly and cried, “Why are you looking at me like that?” offended that I was paying her such close attention. I had to remember that I had not been around my family for a long while. I had been with people who were open, strong and vulnerable, who responded to life and to each other.

Attention, openness, responsiveness—we crave it so much that it offends us when our awareness is drawn to such a deep need.

Rather than having a debate about the “evolution” of human consciousness or the “meeting” of individuality and divinity, why not start a practice today, now. Breathe; close your eyes and breathe, deeply accept everything inside, outside, all around, in and out and through your conscious awareness. You will feel immediate relief if you are able to do this. Breathe into that relief; feel the expansiveness and the inner space that creates. Now from the moment you move from here, from this present experience, keep to your center, even withdraw sometimes to your center. When an outward or an inward event occurs in time, during the course of your day, notice, but do not obstruct it. You will find it—feelings, reactions, hurt, anger, interpersonal dynamics, the dirty floor, the car that needs washing, the child pulling at you—goes right by you if you don’t obstruct it, because you respond, rather than react.

Allow yourself the freedom which is your natural, divine state of being and flow through your day, however hard, however easy it is, whatever way it turns out to be. And it is changing and you are changing the whole time. But your center is not. That self-abiding, stable, real, fluid, expansive, all-accepting, non-judgmental, peaceful center is where you discover, if you are responsive and responsible, you true self.

III.

From the time I felt the first resistance to the force of forward motion in the birth canal, events invited response and continue to invite response. For me though, the misery of the long hours of frustration and silence, asking, begging, demanding attention, to be held, fed, caressed, nurtured and loved were met with an all-pervasive lack of response. Later the interference with the natural processes of biology: evacuation, eating, drinking were forced, pressured, as I tried to breathe in the smog of tobacco smoke in the house, in the car, in the backyard, everywhere. Crying, screaming, finally giving up and remaining silent—what was the point in shouting or screaming when no one came? Becoming quieter and then quiet and fully in-turned, then being praised—he’s a “good” baby (he does not respond).

In time becoming sullen, morose, unresponsive and criticized at home, in school, at relative’s visits for not responding, criticized for words I had learned and used, not knowing in my innocence what they meant. Crying still, but inside now, and outwardly moody, glum, depressed, unavailable and unresponsive. For years and years, all the excitement, all the life and passion, enthusiasm and intensity buried. Like a lion in a cage, pacing inside like the strong pulse of my heart, of the blood, until through anxiety, failed relationships, confusion, perplexity and bafflement, followed by discovery, remembrance, faith, hope and breakthrough, the emotions came tumbling out.

Even then a few years more before I became genuinely responsive, responding, responsible for myself and sometimes to others. It all began one day with a gold fish I saved from a movie set, took home and thought: if I can look after this fish I might begin to make some progress in relationships. It was a start in learning to love.

BLOG entry #146

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. ‘Responsible’ was first published in 2012.