About Contemplative Therapy
Contemplative therapy asks the question “Who Am I?” and invites the client into a journey of discovery and revealment in a safe and supportive environment. It asks this question in many ways, and gets hints of answers in many forms, all of which turn out to be poetic.
Contemplative therapy takes the issues that the client brings, just as in any other psychotherapeutic session, and digs deep into the constructions of identity from which these issues arise. It’s an ongoing inquiry, for both client and therapist, a guided and special version of what I believe we must all do in our daily lives to stay energised and alive.
It’s staying with the water-course, the Tao, where truly creative living occurs. Contemplative therapy provides intimations at this level of truth, intimations of who we really are.
Many desires come up in daily life and bring me continual agitation. How should I deal with these desires?
When you look really deeply into the motive for your actions in daily life, you will see that they are generally for the survival of the “I-concept”, the person. It is important to be aware of this. When you really feel in you the desire to be happy, totally follow this desire. Fundamentally, all desire leads to the one source of desire, the desire to be desireless, to be free from desire. But we must follow desire like we follow the shadow projected by a tree. It leads to the tree.
What is Contemplative Therapy?
The term “contemplative psychotherapy” was coined by Chögyam Trungpa a Buddhist meditation master.
My take is a broad one – that contemplative therapy can call on the wisdom of many spiritual traditions, both East and West, in the service of the client.
What I Offer
I offer one-on-one and couples psychotherapy sessions in in Sydney’s Double Bay, and also on Skype. For further details, see Therapy Duo.
You can also contact me using the contact page.
Poetics and the Contemplative Approach
The soul loves images, it dreams in images and in poetics. This is how we’re built, and I believe we must guard against the literal and the too-academic in psychotherapeutic work.
We must learn to be open to the soul’s yearnings. I hope you’ll read the posts in this blog in this way – through the lens of poetry.
None of it’s literal, none of it’s just what it says; it’s always trying to point to something deeper, something truer than the stark word or the actual image.
This same poetic approach is one that can be applied to powerful effect in contemplative psychotherapy.
If what man is looking for is in him, why has he forgotten about it? Why is it not realized every day?
There is nothing spiritual or not spiritual. All is spiritual. Everything becomes spiritual the moment it refers to its background, to silence. It is silence which makes an object sacred. It is sacred when it refers to ultimate awareness. Then it ceases to be an object, because it is an expression of consciousness, an extension of consciousness.
About Me
I’m a Sydney-based psychotherapist with a burning interest in a contemplative approach to therapy and counselling. I’m a Member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand) and work with individual clients and with couples – often as joint therapist with my wife Amanda Gruhn (Karima).
See our joint psychotherapy site Therapy Duo.
This Blog
This blog has morphed from an early one called “Art+Psyche”, which lasted from 2008 to mid-2010. Out of my Fine Arts background I blogged on Outsider Art and its relation to the Psyche. You can still see most of these posts under the Art+Psyche Category.
After a year break from blogging (and some internal recorrection to the Tao!) I’ve returned and am pleased to continue the journey into my area of passion – how a contemplative approach can ground internal work in a deep and lasting way. These more recent posts are under the Contemplation Category.
This is not to discount other psychotherapeutic approaches, such as those of my own Gestalt training. In fact, it takes Gestalt right back to its roots. (Fritz Perls went to Japan and studied Zen.) Those roots, to me, are still totally alive. And Gestalt has now also made the important journey into the relational and how that experience of the ground of our being can be a shared one, between therapist and client; between any of us in relationship.
(The quotes above are from a talk given by Jean Klein.)
