Belly (Pen and colour pencil on paper)
Someone emailed me recently asking if I knew of any writings that integrate narrative therapy with mindfulness practices. (If anyone knows of such writings, please let me know.)
I wasn’t really able to help him but I liked the question and it’s made me think more about what “mindfulness” means and about what “contemplative therapy” means for me.
The word mindfulness is charged with many meanings. (See, for example, this Wikipedia article.) In a psychological context, the Wikipedia Mindfulness (psychology) article also has lots of good stuff. (I notice the Gestalt section is fairly scant!) However, I guess because I didn’t come to my approach thorough these practices I do not use this word.
For me, contemplative therapy is an inner process that’s discovered, rather than taught, with and for each client. It aims to be true to the uniqueness of each client; and to remain open to what is revealed. It’s a process in some ways akin to the incubation practices in ancient Western cultures.
Contemplative therapy is an ongoing practice for me as well; one I’ve been involved in for many years, and one that reveals ever deeper levels of truth and understanding. I doubt I’ll ever be finished.
My experience is that there’s an ongoing deepening of connection to, and understanding of, the truth that all the answers we need are, and have always been, inside ourselves. The master is within, a deeply intimate and ever-to-be-trusted guide.
Tagged as:
Incubation,
Psychotherapy
Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.
What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.
Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:
All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]
Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.
Tagged as:
Noumenal Field,
Psychotherapy
Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!
Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.
Tagged as:
Adyashanti,
Psychotherapy
More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.
Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)
Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.
And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.
And as she says later:
Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)
Tagged as:
Bernadette Roberts,
Psychotherapy
