Why seek help?

• Some part of your life is not working (at least not the way you want it to or believe that it can)!
• No joy, little pleasure, feeling bad a lot – some kind of depression/some kind of anxiety/ or both.

 

Relationships

• Having trouble finding, sustaining, growing good relationships.
• Feeling stuck or wanting to deepen your current relationships.
• Need guidance, company, help with some life transition.
• Difficulty with career, marriage, or friendships.
• Wanting/needing support/guidance with religious community or own spiritual life/path.

 

Spiritual Emergency

• Addicted to or misusing, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, work, shopping, gaming, facebook…and, this is causing problems in your life!
• Your pain and suffering may simply be overwhelming

 

All these are signs that you need to bring the car to the shop, or take your beloved pet to the vet. Listen to the call of your dis-ease. Get help! Why not?!

I just want to say a few words about character.

 

Before and beyond whatever my wife and I did to our two kids, they came into this world different. At bottom, my son is a buddha boy. He has a profound calm wisdom at the core of his being. I remember holding him in my arms and gently rocking him when he was an infant. I was thinking that I would rock him until he was asleep and then gently lay him in the bassinet. Well before sleep, and before I thought he was ready, he began arching his back and reaching towards the bassinet, basically telling, me, “please put me down, I’m ready to chill in my little bed.” So, I laid him down, and, happy as a pig in poo, he quietly drifted off to sleep. This is Zeb!

 

My daughter has always been a fiery spirit a dragon spirit with her own tempestuous and powerful wisdom. She and the goddess of sleep were at war from day one. Because she never seemed ready to be put down, we tried letting her cry it out until sleep came. IT NEVER DID. I’m sure we did not do the right thing. But nothing seemed to work. Eventually, and with our clumsy support, she found her way, for some years at least, to being able to sleep peacefully.

 

The point is, from the git go, May was totally and wonderfully different than Zeb.

 

Though I am not an expert with the enneagram, it does teach us a great deal about the nature of character. It provides a lexicon of nine different character types. To my mind, this system describes a limited variety of ways that we dance towards and away from union. Each of these styles has weaknesses and strengths and the enneagram provides a map to help us recognize and navigate the character that flavors our being in the world. (provide link to andrew hahn and other enneagram resources)

 

Our job as parents, teachers, and healers, is to get to know the flavor and style of being of our various charges and help them to lovingly and skillfully ride the horse they have been given to ride. We are not here to fix or cure or overcome these styles of being. There is nothing wrong with any of these. Each arises from and is an expression of the primordial wisdom with which all of life is imbued. We are here to discover and celebrate and help them discover and celebrate the gifts and work creatively and compassionately with the challenges associated with that particular style of being human.

Our soul waits. It waits. It waits for the tiniest thread of an authentic welcome. When it senses this kind of welcome, it cannot help but respond!

 

It is vital and utterly transformative for us to be seen with God’s eyes or the soul’s eyes. This is the kind of mirroring that we all seek, that our soul seeks, and is the only mirroring that can accurately and dynamically reflect the truth of our own divinity, and therefore, specialness, goodness and innocence. Our spirit requires this kind of blessing gaze in order for it to become what it/we have been given to be.

 

It is critical that healers, therapists, counselors and coaches, remember that their true eyes are God’s* eyes. Remembering this, we healers can relax into these eyes and let these eyes, our own soul’s eyes, seek and find the slumbering divinity in the eyes, in the being of our clients. When our eyes, guided by the Seer, seek their Neighbor in the eyes of our clients, then will that Neighbor, then will their slumbering divinity awaken. It cannot help but awaken.

 

When we are seen with God’s eyes, when, a fellow human, allows their soul eyes to seek and see us, our whole being comes alive. The divine light cannot help but stir and begin to stretch out and make itself felt and known. Then does our inner compass, our inner genius, wisdom, grace, and humble greatness, become evident, accessible, ready to rock and roll!

 

Internal Family Systems (IFS), amplified by this remembrance of latent divinity, provides the most simple and precise set of tools to foster this kind of witnessing and self-witnessing, this kind of love-mirror.
This is not blind theory. All of this has been tested and, with the proper guidance and support, you can and should test it with and for yourself.

 

Artful and skillful therapy embodies this kind of transformative mirroring. It also will help you become this kind of a self-mirror. Your own God’s eyes will become self-awake.

 

*Remember, if the word “God,” is triggering or offensive, then replace it with spirit, tao, evolutionary intelligence, fertile mystery…

An essential role of primary caregivers/parents, good friends, and healers is to see you with God’s eyes.
Like the rest of our being, our eyes are a pr0duct of the immeasurably creative evolutionary Intelligence that permeates and gives rise, ongoingly, to all of life. In essence, our eyes are the eyes of that primordial Intelligence, they are, even if we forget this, God’s eyes.
This may sound strange, or kind of fluffy, or just spiritual theory. To my mind, it is just common sense, obvious. Time and time again, the experience of me and my clients, shows that this is just inescapable spiritual physics.
When I open to this deep physics, feel my way into or relax into these eyes – eyes that I did not create- and am open to sensing the life of the Seer, the Creator in these eyes, then I will begin to notice, sense, a Seer seeing through these eyes. It then becomes quite clear that I am just the butler welcoming, allowing my eyes to be claimed used by that deeper Intelligence.
There is much that I could say about this Seer, this Presence, who is looking through our eyes. For now, I just want to say that this Seer is, from my experience, compassionate, fierce, curious, connected. Basically, this presence embodies all the qualities of ‘self’ of which IFS speaks. When I am open to finding that presence, it is always there waiting. When I let myself be guided by it’s seeing ways, then does the soul of the world reveal itself to me. Then does the glorious soul of the world wake up or manifest.
When we are wounded, and most of us carry wounds, we will develop ways of protecting the most tender and vital aspects of ourself. When we live in a society that is, to a great degree, ruled by a fear that has paved over our access to spirit with worship of scientism*, various strategies of domination and control, empty consumption, we can fall into a dangerous and deeply protective forgetfulness of, or imprisoning cynicism towards LIFE or spirit. Cut off from our own EYES, from our own souls, we all collectively wander in and defend a desert or purgatory of our own collective making.

That forgetfulness terrifies me. There is a chilling quote that goes like this. “ …the most pernicious thing about forgetfulness is that we forget that we have forgotten.” It terrifies me that we can forget our inescapable connection with the fertile and mysterious ground of Creation. And, even more terrifying, we can seal in those juices by forgetting we have forgotten. In other words, we somehow won’t even know that the life we are living is barely a shadow of LIFE.

*Scientism values scientific method above all other modes of being and knowing. It states that those dimensions of reality that have not yet been vetted or can not be tested by scientific method, have no reality status whatsoever. Scientism makes of scientific method a religion and misapplies it’s injunctions to areas of reality that transcend or are not demonstrable thru scientific method. Scientism annihilates all depth and reduces the world to materialist flatland.

At the heart of many of our patterns of stuckness is a foundational anxiety that can, in part, be traced to problems in early attachment. So, what is attachment?

Essential to being and becoming the person that we were given to be is healthy attachment to a primary caregiver. If that did not occur, if that early and essential relational dance was inadequate or otherwise wounding, then, this wound will need tending. If we want to relax into the world and be who we are here to be, then that hole, those wounds must, through various healing practices be filled or healed. And, with right intention, good help, and yes, hard work, these holes can be filled, those wounds transformed – I speak from personal experience with the holes in my own early attachment dance (no offense intended mom, really!).
From the moment that we are born, a robust and natural wisdom/intelligence pours through us, fills us, directs us to find what we need. This intelligence recognizes and seeks out the eyes of another human being. We seek in those eyes, a proper greeting, recognition, reassuring and reliable positive regard. Aristotle was not wrong when he said that “the eyes are the window to the soul.”
When we have secured that proper greeting and are, for the moment, all filled up, we want to be able to turn away and go our own way…until we, again, feel the scary edges of our separateness, our quasi and not so quasi aloneness. Then, with a cry, we want the eyes of the other to return. We want to be able to access the eyes of the other at a moment’s notice. When we secure the gaze of the other, we want to find in that gaze, that same warm welcome, calm and curious, there to help, support, or simply witness,. Then, when we are all filled up again, off we go.
When we are reliably able to access this kind of presence, we say that we are headed towards secure attachment. Our primary care-givers have given us good reason to trust in the goodness of humankind and the world. From a spiritual point of view, and, because our caregivers have acted as emissaries for this truth, we are guided, consciously or unconsciously by a knowledge that peace, freedom, and basic goodness are the basis of our world. With this kind of modeling, our nervous system will have known a world that responds in a natural, reliable, and dynamic way to the organic rhythms of our movements towards and away from connection (or in a spiritual way, towards and away from union). And this dance, allowed to evolve naturally, will lead to a psychological self-relational and self-other relational structure that is calm, creative, courageous, connected, compassionate, and deeply curious (a number of the C’s of Self).

For many if not most of us, our primary caregivers, had gaps, some of them very serious, in their ability to be the self-led* presence that we all need. If our parents have had some history of either capital “T” or even small “t” trauma and they have not enjoyed serious healing of those traumas, it is likely that their ability to be present to us will be impaired. Also, we live in a society that is, to a great degree, ruled by fear. Families are, for the most part, isolated within communities that are not organized around taking care of one another. Even when our primary caregivers have no clear history of trauma, our society introduces many noxious and disruptive elements into the lives of families. This too will disrupt our capacity to be present to our children. We will find ourselves constantly wrestling with fears inserted into our lives by a society that is, to a great extent, lost.
Disruptions to healthy attachment create foundational instability at the core of our being. This instability underwrites many or even most of the patterns of stuckness that we experience in our lives. Tending and healing these attachment wounds is difficult work. It is also worthy and powerfully transformative work.

For more information on attachment theory:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/attachment.html
https://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins.pdf

*When we are Self-led, our being is imbued with and grounded in these qualities: calm, curiosity, connection, compassion, creativity, courage, clarity,

We come to therapy to make peace with, become skillful with, and fall deeply in love with the dance that we have been given to dance!

 

Our life embodies a pattern, a dance in and around the unity of creation. Think of the unity of reality as the color white. Our being is a colorful movement towards and away from that white, bringing forth the almost infinite colors of being.

 

We work with therapists, healers, healing communities to discover the color and pattern of our dance in and around the blinding white light of unity.

 

Within ourselves, and in all of our relationships, there will be a dance. It will be our dance. We cannot escape our dance. When we fight this dance, our life is a mess. When, with proper guidance, we learn how to harmonize with, surrender to, honor this dance, then will we flourish. Then will our dance support and serve the dances that are going on all around us. Then will we find OUR place in the cosmic dance of which we all are an inextricable part.

There are maps to help us get oriented within the world/reality and within ourselves. Wisdom traditions the world over have developed maps that describe the structure of the cosmos. When all of these maps are placed alongside one another, it becomes clear that each has arrived at similar basic structure, that each describes similar dimensions of reality and experience.

 

In the last, almost one hundred years, psychologists and developmental researchers and theorists have further helped to map different dimensions of the human psyche. Here too, there is great overlap.

 

One of the best collators of these many kinds of maps, maps of the cosmos and of the psyche, is Ken Wilbur. It is worth looking at any of his many books to see how these different maps relate to one another and illuminate different dimensions of reality.
Although we can get through life without a map or some kind of orienting guide posts, we can save ourselves a great deal of time and effort by looking at these maps so that we can begin to make some sense of where we are in the world and what is going on inside ourself.

 

Now, the map is not the territory, and a recipe for chocolate cake does not replace the experience of eating a slice of that same cake. However, to arrive at a beautifully moist and chocolatey cake without a recipe, may be a fun project, but it will take a very long time. And, you might want to eat that cake long before you discover the right map to get you there.

 

In this web site, I have described a number of maps. I have provided a rough outline, culled from my study of a number of wisdom traditions, of the basic structure of reality.

 

Drawing upon a number of psychological traditions including IFS, I have provided some mapping of our inner world.

 

Maps are useless if you don’t know how to read them. They are useless if you don’t use them to help you navigate your world. Along with these maps, there are injunctions, directions, practices that direct us to explore in a direct manner, the territory laid out by these maps. Unless we perform the injunctions, follow the recipe’s directions, we will never get to test the cake. If we do not perform the injunctions, we will never truly taste, experience the life described by these maps. Too often, we become preoccupied with the maps. We get caught up in intellectual mastery of the maps without ever performing the injunctions and really diving into reality. We never get to taste the cake or experience miraculous and wondrous reality in a direct and immersive manner.

 

So, these maps are powerful tools. They shed light on the wonderful and sometimes terrible mess of life. They bring hope that this mess is intelligible. If others can make sense of this mess, then so can we. Yahoo.

 

The psychological map that I am finding most simple and useful is Internal Family Systems.

Why seek help?
– Some part of your life is not working (at least not the way you want it to or believe that it can)!
– No joy, little pleasure, feeling bad a lot – some kind of depression/some kind of anxiety/ or both.
– Need guidance, company, help with some life transition.
-Difficulty with career, marriage, or friendships.
– Wanting/needing support/guidance with religious community or own spiritual life/path.
– Spiritual Emergency
(http://realitysandwich.com/1800/spiritual_emergencies/)
– Addicted to or misusing, drugs, alcohol, food, sex, work, shopping, gaming, facebook…and, this is causing problems in your life!
– Your pain and suffering may simply be overwhelming

Relationships
– Having trouble finding, sustaining, growing good relationships.
– Feeling stuck or wanting to deepen your current relationships.

All these are signs that you need to bring the “car” to the shop, or take your “beloved pet” to the vet..NOW!

Listen to the call of your dis-ease. Get help! Why not?!

A good therapist is a number of things. As I have already said, s/he is a dynamic love-mirror. Also, a therapist is a guide who, having studied some good maps, AND, having travelled their own and their clients’ territories MANY times, can help you discover and become a skillful partner in identifying and navigating the basic structure and patterns of your psyche.

 

For most of us, discovering these basic structures and realizing that the inner mess is actually intelligible and navigable is a revelation and a relief.

 

And, as when we are guided through a wilderness by a skilled guide who can speak for the dynamic ecological goodness of all elements of that wilderness system, it is a relief, revelation, and blessing to discover that all the elements of our inner ecosystem is, likewise wholesome and good. It is wild and wondrous to discover the inherent genius and goodness of every element of our psyche.

 

So, we come to therapy to discover and work with a beingness, a beingness that we were afraid was broken or bad or unmanageable or unloveable, but that is, in fact, demonstrably navigable and wholesome.

 

YAHOO!

There is a way in which many spiritual traditions and practices view the big fat juicy middle of our humanity, our emotions, the psychological dimension of our being, as something to transcend, as somehow problematic.

 

In the buddhist tradition, for example, attraction, aversion and disinterest are called the three poisons. If we are simply blended with these, bounced around by these, then, yes, they can be a poison to our life and stand in the way of true freedom.

 

However, when we have a relationship with these, they carry information about our relationship with various aspects of life and about ourselves.

 

So, while it is true, that we are bigger or more than the emotions that we carry, that roll through us, our emotions too are imbued with the same primordial wisdom with which all life is imbued. While it is true that emotions come and go, pass away like dew on morning grass, it is also true that our emotions are carriers of a divine spark and constitute a precious dimension of our being.

 

When my body recoils from a taste, a smell, that is noxious, that is information. When I find myself drawn to some taste or smell, that is a different kind of information. To be ruled by these is a problem. To have a relationship with repulsion and attraction is essential.

 

The same is true of our reactions to people. To some people we have an automatic reaction of attraction or repulsion. To be blended with these reactive emotions, is dangerous. To develop a relationship with these is vital to finding and creating a community of friends, lovers, life dance-partners.

 

The same is true of our emotions. Grief, fear, anger, even terror and disgust, all carry information, are the calling cards of parts of ourselves and the world that need tending, that need to be heard.

 

It is vital that we develop the bandwidth to feel and, as a part of the process of feeling, grow bigger than the feeling so that we can enjoy a relationship with the part of us that carries and needs these feelings to have a place. Grow bigger may not be quite right. We already have, within us, a dimension of being, Self, in the IFS tradition, that is always already free from and free for all of life. It is the job of Self, of the mature ego, to welcome, to be present to, all of life, including VERY intense emotions. It is the job and the opportunity of Self to welcome all of life and harvest the wisdoms, the information, the energies born by the parts of ourself that carry and are capable of holding intense emotion.

 

We have a capacity to FEEL. We have a capacity, it is our nature to feel, to feel for and feel about life. When something or someone we love leaves, IT WILL HURT! The impulse to cry, the anger, the fear, are all a wholesome part of that event. People, things matter to us, and, when they break, fall apart, die, many feelings will arise. These feelings are, in part, a measure of the mattering of these things, these people.

 

Feeling all of these feelings is a part of being human. It is part of the juicy richness of this precious life. If we refuse, if we flee, bypass, suppress these feelings, then we also cut ourselves off from our capacity to experience and enjoy other feelings, feelings of joy, of unfettered and unguarded laughter and delight. The same “organs,” instruments that resonate with terror, rage, grief, are the same ones that can carry and vibrate with joy, delight, sweet pleasure. And yes, we are more than these too. We are the place, the space, where all of this happens.

 

Through our capacity to feel, the world enjoys a feelingful relationship with itself. It is, in part, through our emotions, that the world speaks to and through us. The trees, shedding their leaves, awakens in us a beautiful combinations of feelings. Warm appreciation and delight at the beauty of these leaves. Waves of sadness as these leaves announce the passing of another year, show us the ways of death and dying. Calls us to a calmness that the tree so beautifully embodies. Through our nervous system, the tree enjoys a self-relation. In shamanic traditions, we learn that one of the purposes of life is to live in dialogue with the spirit and mind of the natural world. This is part of our duty and it is also a blessing.

 

Part of the work of healing, of coming into wholeness, is the work of welcoming, making way for, and FEELING all the feelings, even the most difficult, that are part of life. The more we can practice with OUR own feelings, the greater will be our bandwidth and our capacity to resonate whole heartedly, with a soft and resonant belly, with all of life. Then can we be relaxed and open and grounded and present in the face of ALL of life, no matter how challenging. Then, will we be able to stay rooted in faithful openness to all of life. Then, as the winds of powerful emotions complete their circuit, will we feel the wide open spaciousness that allows joy and delight and laughter to bubble and bounce and shine through our whole being. Then will this place, that we somehow are, be a sacred place. As Heidegger said, we are the house of being. Let there be room in this house for all of life, let us welcome, into our home, all that seeks, calls for, a proper welcome.