SPIRITTHERAPIST

SPIRITUAL MENTORING ADDRESSES THE WHOLE PERSON:

BODY-MIND-SPIRIT-RELATIONSHIP-FAMILY-CULTURE-WORLD

Spiritual Mentoring is about accompanying and guiding a student on their spiritual path. I work within the framework of Spiritual Psychology and utilize many psychological and spiritual practices with mentees. The goal is to connect the student with their own inner experience of spiritual reality: Truth and Love so that they can fulfill their purpose in life. 

 The framework for Spiritual Psychology is as follows:

• Life is a school for souls to learn the lessons they need for their full realization of the Truth of who they are.

• Judgements and Misconceptions about who we are are the cause of our perceived separation from Divine Love.

• That is why Forgiveness of self and others is key to this process.

• Radical Self Acceptance and Self Compassion are key to healing and Self Realization.

•  Rather being our enemy, Vulnerability is the gateway to Spirituality.

• Releasing the supposed defenders of our woundedness puts us in direct contact with our vulnerability.

• Realization is not about rejecting our woundedness, it is about healing our woundedness.

• The application of Love to the parts that hurt inside us are the way to healing.  

 As healing and learning progress, one’s Calling becomes ever clearer: how to create, serve and enjoy Life. As we engage with our life, the question of clarifying and manifesting our Calling continues. Issues can come up that seem to block us or divert from our Calling. We begin to realize that these seeming blockages are not here to sabotage and undermine our Calling. They are in truth manifesting in order that we may heal whatever within us needs attention and understanding.

 DISCLAIMER:

While Spiritual Psychology addresses some of the issues that traditional psychotherapy deals with, it works from a different framework and has a different focus. First of all, the healing and transcendence of the defenses of egoic consciousness are the focus for Spiritual Psychology. Its primary purpose is to assist us in finding ways to go beyond our egoic consciousness. Consequently, it uses as its primary tools, practices such as Meditation, Self Compassion, Radical Acceptance, Forgiveness, Inquiry, Somatic Awareness and many ways of nurturing the connection to the Beloved.

 Spiritual Psychology will, like traditional Psychotherapy, address so called ego deficiencies and ego defenses in order to strengthen daily function, but that is not its prime purpose. The purpose of Spiritual Psychology is to assist us in releasing our over identification with egoic consciousness and to connect with the Beloved – the Divine Source - residing in each one of us.

Those of us who identify as spiritual have had intimations that there is something greater than ourselves. We have had experiences where our usual everyday egoic consciousness has dropped away and we make contact directly with what is: without our mind’s typical critical commentary and pigeonholing of things and our psychologically based emotional reactivity. When this happens, we are in awe and we know we are “standing on holy ground”. The big question is, how do we maintain and further develop this awareness so that it begins to permeate and transform our everyday life?

All spiritual traditions talk about this: that there is something greater than our common everyday experience of life. These deep traditions have sacred scriptures, religious frameworks, rituals and spiritual practices to help us to further develop our spiritual lives. Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, we don’t find in these older traditions the specific answers to issues that challenge us on our own personal spiritual journeys. That is where the combination of spiritual awareness and psychological insight can be extremely useful for finding our way forward.

My own spiritual journey of some forty five years has led me to develop an integrated, mind - body - spirit psychologically informed approach to spiritual practice. We can have blocks to our ongoing spiritual unfoldment that can be better addressed by psychology than by our traditional religious framework. For example, in spiritual practices from many traditions, there can be an emphasis on dis-identifying with our all-too-human emotions. This can lead to a kind of dissociative process where we have not fully engaged with our emotional issues and our spiritual realization does not have a solid grounding. This is called Spiritual Bypassing. Then we find our spiritual realization can evaporate when we are under duress in our regular life and sorely need it.

In the work I do with clients, we explore the kinds of spiritual practices they currently engage with, what are the major spiritual learnings showing up in their lives presently, and what issues from their childhood remain to be addressed. Together we look at what additional spiritual practices and psychological processing might be useful. We work on further healing their childhood wounds and we listen together for where the Divine invitation is calling them at this moment in their lives.

There is a certain paradox in spiritual work; it upends our usual ego based understanding of what the world is all about. We are moving towards our vulnerability which is what our ego defenses want to protect us from. A good working definition for ego is : Edging God Out. As we “let go and let God”, however we understand God or True Nature, it is natural that our egos will resist. And the more we intend to let go, the more vehemently our ego defenses may resist.Then the question is: how do we work with the resistance and not see it as the enemy to try to conquer- a dualistic framework which will not lead us to freedom? As we engage spiritual practice, it is important that we understand clearly that our Super Egos with all their judgments about what is good and what is bad (and even what is and isn’t spiritual) don’t lead us into Divine Presence.

Love is the Way. It always has been and always will be for us humans. Love is what we are looking for, often in all the wrong places: outside of ourselves in someone or something else. Gradually, as we let go of our desperate search for the wrong thing, we learn to appreciate the right thing which has been under our very noses the whole time: our experience as it is, our mind and heart open in this present moment. Gradually as we learn to accept and love ourselves just as we are, we open to God’s abundant love which has always been there for us. We just couldn't see it.