While I’m grateful that going to therapy has become more socially acceptable, I’m not sure we are moving towards real collective growth. I do appreciate that we can at least admit we have issues and imbalances and start to talk about them, which is certainly a step forward from denial and repression. Contemporary therapy sometimes feels like an expensive and elaborate way to continue to identify with your pain. There are so many kinds of therapy and philosophies behind them, we’ve gotten obsessed with the minutiae of how to describe the pain rather than empowering people to move out of it.
When we only exist within the framework of the mind, we will only be as big as whatever problem we are currently working on. Beliefs and opinions about the nature of the psyche can drag on for lifetimes because the psyche is infinite and we can’t see ourselves. Without a larger field of context, of holding, there is no real change. In short, we are stubborn motherfuckers, who insist on maintaining the status quo even if we are in misery. The brain needs help to expand out of the past attachment to delusion and trauma. Luckily, we know enough about the brain and its negative biases, memory reconsolidation, the automatic mode network’s function to reinforce what was as what will always be, and the caloric expenditure required for real change. Expansion is perceived as unsafe, and unless we are responding with calculated daily discipline to rewire the brain, it will persist in cementing a contracted level of consciousness.
This is where God comes in. Yes, GOD! In western, liberal psychotherapy circles, this is almost a dirty word, which I get, given how much bloodshed, shame, and overall harm has been caused in the name of God. To cut to the chase, all that bloodshed, shame, and harm was caused by confused humans. God had nothing to do with it. What the church, what organized religion has done to God is possibly the greatest sin and greatest source of evil on our planet. “To sin” meaning, to miss the mark, to go out of integrity with your soul’s natural unfolding. We are all sinners when we refuse to truly connect— to ourselves, to each other, to nature, and yes, to God.
Triggered yet?
Good, because real transformation, real therapy requires you to step outside your reinforced comfort zone and be willing to question who you think you are. Healing mandates that we begin to assume the personality and the mind create habits that are in fact anti-relational and anti-life. The sooner we can get to a genuine “I’m sorry,” the better. Beyond pointing the finger at who hurt you, we orient towards beginning to take responsibility for our own choice to resist true intimacy.
And we can’t fake “I’m sorry,” just like we can’t fake gratitude or forgiveness. When we are stuck in the mode of blaming anything and anyone outside of ourselves for why we are failing to actualize as ourselves…misery layers on top of misery. A whole lot of therapists make their living this way, by holding space for people to repeat their same disabling stories of victimhood. And in fact, add to the story with fancy psychological language and theory.
Since humans have the innate tendency to blame, reinforce the status quo, and stew in self-righteousness, we need to have a non-human framework of greater intelligence to hold the space with us! However you wish to define God is up to you, and if you need to use a different word to get there, great. We humans need help to get beyond the limitations of the mind and our over-identification with the personality, which essentially could be described as a detailed trauma response. The only way that makes sense to me is to have a real in-your-bones experience of this greater intelligence and design.
How to cut through all the nonsense and millennia of false programming about prayer, worship, and ritual? Without turning into a new age “spiritual” person? Start to take time everyday to connect with yourself, with your breath and to your heart—these are ancient technologies written in your DNA. You don’t have to read a book or learn a multi-step technique to do what we are encoded to do, which is to feel at one with Life. Connect to the creature of your body, to your love, to your desires, to the direct felt sense moment to moment experience always unfolding within you. Without story, without mental commentary. Now.