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The Essential Self

The Essential Self

by | May 23, 2021 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development | 0 comments

 

 

 

 

The exploration and mapping of the ‘self’ have been at the heart of psychological and spiritual inquiry. There is the  self we have access to in our day to day lives and a Self that is obscure and reveals itself primarily through peak experiences, as a much broader place of knowing and potential. The various manifest and unmanifest aspects of self, exist in dialogue and tension at the very edges of our growing.  

 

THE EGOIC SELF 

The part that is most accessible to us through everyday life is the egoic self. Here lies our centre of consciousness, holding the thread of continuity between past and present, through which we weave our sense of identity and belonging. The egoic self holds our life stories and becomes shaped through the ripples of cause and effect that these create. If we grew up with intrusive or aggressive parents, then our egoic self may become impermeable as a result of finding intimate relationships unpredictable, threatening or overwhelming. If we grew up in a family that consistently neglected our basic needs, then our egoic self may grow around a deep sense of worthlessness. If we have come from a family of ancestral riches and success, then our egoic self may constantly strive to maintain our belonging through following on our ancestors’ footsteps. What this means, is that while we tend to think of the egoic self as distinct and separate from others, it actually comes to exist through a web of fairly proximate relationships that come to shape its curves and edges. Everything we know so well about the impact of ancestral and early environments on later personality supports this. I like to think of the egoic self as a tree that is part of a much bigger forest, intimately bound and dependent on the overall health of the wider ecosystem its roots belong to. 

The egoic self that exists within the realm of everyday consciousness is destined to hold a narrower view into the deep complexities of life. Tightly bound with our early developmental needs and wounds, it can inflate everyday encounters to shapes of utmost and ultimate importance. At times it lands us in our well-developed abilities and resources and at times it pulls us through our early narcissistic wounds and primitive defences. And so, the egoic self can at times render us deeply vulnerable and tied to the mortal games of life, the frightful struggles for control and ultimately survival.

THE ESSENTIAL SELF

Behind the contours of the egoic self, hidden from view in our encounters with everyday life, lies the essential Self; eternal and expansive. This deep space of knowing exists through many names; some call it true nature, consciousness, spirit, soul, deep psyche, or wisdom. Firmly rooted within the greater picture of all things, it lends us a perspective that joins the dots between the minutia of life. The essential self operates from a deeper, wider and broader source of reality. Its knowing penetrates into the very heart of any matter, allowing us to stand in soulful truth. From here we become resourced to face the greater existential matters and explore the bigger answers life calls on us to draw from. The essential self can ease the tyrannical fears of the egoic self, giving us space to contemplate life’s challenges and resources from a place of deeper presence, authenticity, connection and compassion. It can help us reshape the stories of our egoic self and reframe how we relate to our lives.

The essential self is the bedrock of our highest values, integrity and truth. It discerns everything that ever happens as a micromovement, its outcomes vastly uncharted and unknown. How many times have we deeply grieved only to find new life emerging through the undergrowth of our pain and sorrow? How many times have we deeply craved for something only to find it unfolding into a different reality to what we dreamed of? Such movements through life’s twists and turns are supported by the essential self which is tightly bound to the ebb and flow of life, the deeper currents of death and rebirth, chaos and order, the coming apart in service of a renewed coming together, the interdependence of it all. From these deep roots all is ever growing, ever emerging, ever becoming. We can think of the essential self as the forest that surrounds and sustains the tree of the egoic self. The great mother that can nourish its frail vulnerabilities and temper its infantile struggles. While the egoic self is bound by the wounds of the past, the essential Self radiates the potential healing of the future. While ego struggles to be right, the essential self strives to be whole.  

NAVIGATING BETWEEN THE TWO

But how does one move from ego-consciousness to the essential eco-consciousness? From the part to the whole? From what matters to us at any given moment in time to what matters in the greatest spread of things? How do we gestate something greater to emerge and become a reality through us? Such midwifing requires some kind of inner communion and connection. It doesn’t tend to happen while we are on autopilot, moving ahead from task to task, from day to day, deeply ingrained into the rustling humdrum of everyday life. Sometimes a wounding, a slippery time, open this entrance. Sometimes when the ego is overwhelmed and at a loss for answers, the essential self finds an opening to reach us. Rites of passage and initiations like the one we have collectively and unwittingly stepped into through Covid, myths, rituals and ceremonies, expanded states of consciousness, embodied practices, deeply reflective and contemplative practices can open the door to our path, our healing, our sense of purpose, our greater truth, our true belonging. They can bring the essential self in support and service to the egoic self.

There are times where moving from one to the other is immediate and seamless and other times where the egoic self can become overwhelmed by the realities and input of the essential self, requiring a long journey to support this integration. Such openings to something greater require a resilient enough ego-center that can withstand and sustain the contact between the egoic and the essential self. There is also a wider need for the containing power of community that can acknowledge the value and develop the trust required by such a process.

In the hands of some new age belief systems the essential self has been turned into an inner knowing God to whom we only need to surrender all of our life’s struggles and responsibilities. But in depth-psychology, these deeper archaic forces require our utmost presence and participation. We have to step into the hidden layers of our pain that this place opens us up to and the responsibility that comes with deeper knowing, if we are to receive the inner resourcing it can offer.  The essential self is a place we must always come to and then return from. The dangers of residing here are too grave. While we might wish to stay here to inflate or numb ourselves from life’s painful encounters, we risk bypassing reality and our human capacity for tension, pain and therefore growth. The dangers of residing only in the egoic self is to be continually re-wounded by our blind spots, risking burnout and depression. The egoic and the essential self are neither to be kept apart as separate nor may not choose one over the other. They are meant to be kept in constant connection, nourishing one another with their alternate and diverse realities. While we must never abandon the egoic self, we turn to the essential self for a deeper nourishing of our resources, preparing for our next steps, onto the ground of reality.  Indeed, our spiritual, psychic and emotional health depend on periodically coming to step into this greater re-source of things, this space of greater wholeness. 

OUR CURRENT TIMES

In our current collective times, on an egoic level, we are in crisis. On an essential level, the world is trying to speak to us and reach us. These are times that require our utmost inner and outer participation. Away from the polarities of catastrophe and divine intervention, in the midst of the greatest collective event we have encountered as a generation, lies a powerful archetypal territory taking us through the pivotal process of death and rebirth. Such challenges call on us to reach further within ourselves so we can grow to our collective and archetypal greatness and vastness, to our true essential nature, to nature herself.  

In this great initiation we are being called to our values and our integrity. To navigating our path with intention and purposefulness. To accessing the deepest strands of our humanity. There is a lot for all of us to grapple with; questions with answers, questions without answers, answers still waiting for the right questions. Our deeply ingrained collective ego structures are being challenged. If we can sit through this painful shedding process, we can access our deepest hidden wounds as they become available for healing.  In the words of Lynne Twist:

The primary battlefield of this century is with ourselves. It is the battle between the self and the Self: between our existing habituated self and our emerging future Self, both individually and collectively.

As we navigate through these times, the essential self is being called to bring its deep roots, its deep belonging to all things, in greater view. When we ground in this connection to the source of all things, we can return, re-sourced and connected, to the resilient centre of our egoic self, to meet the tasks we are faced with. Once we connect to the brightest possible light of knowing within ourselves, the animating force of the world, we can begin to recover a deep love and respect for all our mortal brokenness. With humility and courage we embark on the healing journey of slowly transforming our wounds into growthful potential.

 

The Incubating Stillness

The Incubating Stillness

by | Dec 31, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Mental Health, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 0 comments

Art by Heather Mclean

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the yearly cycle draws to a close, people I work with have been reflecting on the year that has suspended most of our habitual ways of being. Their reflections have been surprising, inspiring and powerful, as they reveal a deeper narrative of silent growth. The dominant narratives in the public discourse have been focusing on the experiences of stuckness and stillness.

 

The words ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ have entered our daily vocabulary, casting a spell on our sense of the world around us.  And while these words describe concretely what is occurring in the external world, the people I work with brought forth new narratives that acknowledge the ever-unfolding and ever-evolving movements of nature, that apply to our inner worlds. While life on the outside seems to have stood still, our internal worlds have kept on ticking. Perhaps even more so, as a reflexive balancing act towards the excruciating constrictions of the outside.

 

Up against the background of stillness, the movements of our inner worlds  are more discernible than ever. Indeed, so much has happened in a year that so little has moved. Taken out of our routines and habits we have all had to sit with our fear, our frustration, our discomfort, our rage and most importantly we have had to sit with our selves. Our internal world has taken centerstage, urging us to deeply question our lives, values and choices.

 

Such disruptions break the mold and unleash a chaos that holds the imprints of a new potential emergent order. A chaos that supports new openings towards deep and meaningful transformation. In the shadows of Self, movement and connection have not ceased. In these conditions, many of us have come to realize what truly matters, what needs to live and what needs to die. The chaos of uncertainty and restrictions seems to have become fertile ground for people to find the resolve to meet and invite even further uncertainties in their lives. To break the mold a little bit more.

 

Decisions and movements that seemed monumental at the start of the year have started being a reality in motion for many by the end of the year. This year of collective fear, loss and grief, has challenged us to let go in unprecedented ways and degrees. As we have let our layers of habit fall through one by one, as we have stepped into the deep uncertain, as we have lost our ways of being in the world, as we have felt powerless to choose, we have arrived to our grief. We have had to grieve for our communities, our sense of connection, our freedom of movement, people we have lost.

 

Grief that is grieved becomes the fertile soil of regeneration. A new lease of life unfurls when we become intimate with the forces of death. The people I work with have made profound shifts this year. They have decided to face long avoided divorces, they have ended long standing affairs, they have moved houses, they have left their jobs or made career moves at a time where the public discourse insists on keeping us still. There is no stillness in the universe. There is no stillness in our soulful depths. The stillness we were plunged into on the outside was an incubating space where we were all hatching a different future to what we had sleepwalked into.

 

At the end of this year I feel deeply moved to witness people’s spirit and commitment to sitting with their discomfort and attending to the process of midwifing forth whatever is ready to emerge. I see a deepening resilience and a commitment to planting new seeds, pursuing meaningful and authentic ways of being, in service of greater growth. It seems that we have needed the outside world to stop so we can regain the space, time, energy, presence and inner resources required for listening to the voices within that tell us who we are meant to become. These opening to our emergent self are in service to the individual and to the wider collective whole we all belong to.

 

I invite you to take stock, as the year comes full circle to its close, to the seeds you may have intently or inadvertently sowed, deep in the soil of soul. We anticipate another year that will challenge us even further, but despite the external realities and narratives we must hold on to the narratives of our inner resources. All the seeds I have witnessed being sown this year, will be sprouting next year. Whatever challenges we may have to face ahead, next year is destined to be full of new growth, directions and emergent potential.  

 

 

The Arc of Initiation

The Arc of Initiation

by | Jun 6, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 2 comments

Art by Takato Yamamoto

Art by Takato Yamamoto

We are in the midst of a collective crisis and initiation, where peril and potential sit alongside each other. Humanity has always understood that change and transformation require sturdy containers to hold the fluid process of becoming. That all seeds of growth require a vessel in which to gestate. Alchemical stages, myths and fairy tales, initiatory rites and rituals are all such wombs, that birth the emergence of the new. Through their tasks and stages, they map out the timeless cycles of regeneration. And they all highlight the importance of intention that aligns such journeys with meaning and purpose, providing a necessary amulet for navigating these treacherous terrains.

In tribal cultures, initiations and rites of passage were sacred portals. They moved the initiate from a state of being to a stage of becoming. These technologies of the soul would dissolve the initiate’s ego structures in order to support the unfolding of a deep psychic reorganisation. The metamorphosis would evolve in three stages. At first, the initiate would enter a stage of separation and isolation, followed by a period of ordeal, severance and symbolic death, culminating in ceremonial and communal rebirth. In this final stage, the initiate would re-enter the collective whole as a valued tribal member of greater maturity, self-awareness and spiritual connection.

The stage of isolation and separation from the community would sometimes last for months. In this space, the initiate was in a state of uncertainty, disorientation and confusion. As they came to meet themselves in solitude, away from everyday distractions as well as from the tribal guidance and support, they dived deeply within, forced to discover and rely on their own inner resources. Their psychic resources and the wider cosmological guidance they encountered in this liminal space would be their compass in the darkness. Their isolation (often in a cave-like structure) was a symbolic drawing back into the fertile darkness of the womb. In this deep incubating space, the seeds of their future self were sowed, as they began to engage with their psychological and spiritual work. Here, in the regenerative dark, they waited for the Great Vision that would bring them into alignment with their vocation, life-purpose, place in their community and spiritual path.

The incubation stage was followed by the ordeal stage. Their process here was deepening. The initiate was confronted by a painful symbolic encounter with loss, dismemberment and death. It was their encounter with their suffering that activated their inner healing capacities. They were in the field of transformation. They were coming into greater consciousness as they moved from the innocence and dependency of childhood into the maturity and self-sufficiency of adulthood. But the self-sufficiency of these cultures was a highly relational space, as opposed to what this term means to us today. What they gained in their process belonged as much to them as to their collective, and they were to bring the gifts of this liminal space in service for the wider whole.

The ordeal of severance, loss and symbolic death was followed by a collective ceremonial rebirth. The newly emerged adult was welcomed back into their tribe. They were now mature enough to be in service. Here is where their integration process would begin to unfold, as their glimpses of the deep self and soul would become owned, honed and embedded through their participation in the relational field of the collective, their tribe, as a fully-fledged adult.

The person that returns is no longer the same as the person that left the tribe behind. This soul-deep transformation takes place within a sacred space that supports a safe process of renewal. The initiate has moved through the cyclical journey of death and rebirth that all great transitions require. This is a passage that serves the death of something old and the birth of something new. We will all be tasked with encountering a series of death and rebirth cycles throughout our lifetimes that contain the potential of initiating us into greater alignment with a deeper sense of self.  

Initiation rites and rituals are no longer available to us in our so-called modern societies, but the soul that always remembers the journey it needs to undertake will find its process through seemingly-random acts of fate. But without the structured frameworks that would traditionally hold the arc of transformation and contain the necessary chaos that precedes all change, we are called to face them unresourced, come what may. To become initiated is to break in all the right ways and all the right places and through the cracks the possibility of something new may emerge. But not every break meets its mend. As James Hollis says:

There are wounds that crush the soul, distort and misdirect the energy of life, and those that prompt us to grow up.

In the fluid stages of becoming we open up to all possibilities; the integration of our wounds that will nourish our growth, or the disintegration from our wounds and the potential that they become infected and infect.

The path of change, transformation and initiation is paved with great uncertainty. We often do not know where it all leads or what it all means. As we walk away from the fragile edge of what we know and we can count on, we follow the unfolding mystery step by step, guided by our courage, curiosity and our commitment to draw our learning from our journey’s cycles. Such journeys are always purposeful. With intention and with the right containers, we can learn their language and support their creative process, until a deeper balance is restored.

Any movement towards greater awareness and consciousness requires a degree of discomfort, as we peel back the layers to get through to our core. Our encounter with suffering ignites the forces of transmutation, but requires our full participation. By relinquishing our clinging to the illusion of an always happy, easy, perfect and unfettered life and by moving through the grief of our lost innocence and idealizations, we come to cultivate a relationship with the existential agonies of life. At the end of such a journey, we have come to know ourselves and our inner resources in a more intimate way.

Coronavirus and Collective Transformation

Coronavirus and Collective Transformation

by | Mar 23, 2020 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Mental Health, Nature and Self, Political Psychology, Relationship to Self, Shadow Work | 10 comments

Art by Aitch

Art by Aitch

We are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, a crisis that in its speed, spread and intensity has exceeded any other experience of our lifetimes. This crisis is nudging us beyond our current social structures. We are being called to transcend the usual order of things, to think outside the GDP box and move from a humanitarian place; to contain individualism and re-member collectivism. None of the other current crises of our world have mobilized such a need for instant and profound adaptation. We feel safely removed from them as they tend to happen in a localized and distant way, to someone Other, mostly unseen and unfamiliar. We are vaguely aware of the threads between them and us but we have not been good at weaving together things that stand apart. Yet we have now been reached by a crisis that brings all the broken pieces of our world back into wholeness. This crisis has reached us all at once. We are up against an invisible force that has lifted the veils of illusion, offering us a glimpse into our interconnectedness, vulnerability, impermanence and lack of control. It has brought us up against the inescapable hard truths of our fragility and mortality. Of who we are and of our true place as a species in the wider whole. 

Crises have been surrounding us for a while now. In the last few years we have been moving through the tremors of sociopolitical splits, divisive ideologies, mass migrations, fragmented thinking at the expense of systems thinking and the breakdown of climate and biodiversity. Yet as the virus is spreading indiscriminately across borders, race, gender, social class or creed, we come to witness the links of our interconnectedness. Humanity for once is becoming aware that we have always stood in the steps of collective fate as a whole. And we cannot silence this emergency and carry on with life as it was. We need to dig deep to find the gifts that will move us forward. But for now, there is a lot of death to face and a lot of grief to move through. We can no longer hide. We stand in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, the Anthropocene extinction. Humanity is part of it. Cause and effect of it. Our lives and ways will too be threatened. When progress is fueled by arrogance and narcissistic tendencies, it will act against the very nature we are part of. The journey ahead will test and challenge our resources, but also our integrity.

2020 has been so far short and full of warning signs. We started the year with the raging bushfires of Australia and the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest.  The lungs of our earth are under threat and attack. With the coronavirus, now human lungs mirror the same fate. In Chinese medicine, the lungs are associated with grief. We are coming to face our grief and the grief of the land. The grief that longs for what has been lost and ravaged. The grief for all our wrong turns. Our missed chances. Our choices at the various crossroads. Our priorities that have been guided by the illusion of separateness. In destroying the land and its ecosystems, we have been disrupting ourselves for there is no separateness, we are of the land, its dust is in our bones, its rhythms in our heartbeats. Every recent crisis has been moving us one step nearer to realization. This virus is bringing us even closer. It is only by allowing and moving through our grief that we can process and assimilate our losses and recalibrate our moral compass. This is where the new layers of regenerated life can ever really emerge from. The coronavirus pandemic is not just an enemy, it is a medicine just as much. The virus, like any other symptom or ailment, is also an expression of a healing movement. An attempt for healing doesn’t have to feel good to be of urgent necessity. Whether we can use its medicine will depend on our collective ability and will to integrate what we discover in this journey of descent and initiation. It will rest on our capacity to renegotiate who we are, with who we need to become.

Transformation happens through the rhythmic process of taking the self apart and then putting it back together. Chaos gives birth to a new order that is of greater complexity than before. This chaos is the pool of infinite possibility, our unconscious, and the new order is its assimilation into our consciousness. According to Carl Jung:

The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

For now, life gets pushed into the underworld, and death takes central stage. We are in the stages of descent to the subterranean realms of the unconscious, an essential aspect of an initiatory process in any mystery tradition. We are moving to the mythic and archetypal layers of the collective psyche. This is our collective dark night of the soul.  In psychological terms we are in the stage of suffering and darkness. This is a time of inner turmoil, confusion, and uncertainty where we come to face our shadow. It is also a time of immense value, as it is only through this darkness and chaos that we can come into greater wholeness. The journey of initiation and ascent moves our psyches through the cycles of nature and mystery. What is above comes into balance with what is below. What is cultivated within, finds its outward expressions.

In our fast-paced lives, we have been conditioned to short attention spans and to distracting ourselves form our inner worlds by holding our attention outwards. But keeping up with the world outside of us has caused us to run out of step with the world within us. This time can serve as a deep reflective space where we can cultivate our capacity to engage with our inner world and resources, in sacred silence. This is not the silence of disconnection, but the silence that attends to the great mystery that is unfolding all around us. The silence of awe and of intimacy. The silence of meditation and initiation. The silence that seeks rather than stops. The silence that unites us with what hides beneath the noise of everyday life.

As we stand in the spaces of great uncertainty, we are having to find our own ways for holding and soothing ourselves. On an individual level, chaotic and disorganized states will be managed differently by each and every one of us, and will greatly depend on our inner resources for self-regulation and on our capacity to negotiate the chasm between intimacy and isolation. How we will relate to this crisis will be linked with how we relate to ourselves and to others. By turning inwards to meet with all the parts of ourselves that are awakening in the midst of this collective crisis, we might tend to broken parts and pieces that have been long-lost and forgotten. To grief that was never grieved. To tears that were never shed. To fears that were never soothed. To rage that was never met. To self that was never held. It is by moving through our feelings that we become truly embodied. This is how we root into our inner worlds.

All birthing initiates in the darkness. It will take a very long time to fully relate to what is dying and what we are birthing forth. This knowing and clarity only arrives with the wisdom of hindsight, under the weight of time. What we do know is that we are in urgent need of systems that are more sustainable and honor all life on earth. We are being called to move in harmony with the greater ecosystems we are part of. Let this virus be our mirror, guiding us in, through and out.

 

 

The Path of Healing

The Path of Healing

by | Feb 24, 2020 | Anxiety, Depression, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work, Systemic Family Constellations | 6 comments

Art by Aitch

Art by Aitch

In the West, our understanding of the processes of repair and regeneration has been conditioned by the medical model and its inbuilt treatment paradigm. This paradigm has spread beyond the medical profession, becoming the dominant model of how we relate to all discomfort, illness and health. Due to this internalized value system, healing has been a shamed and exiled word in psychology and most of psychotherapy, despite its relevance to these fields. Denied as primitive and incompatible with the realms of science and its inherent status and power that these fields aspire to, healing’s intuitive wisdom has been replaced by ‘clinical knowledge’ and ‘evidence-based’ practices. But when we attend to matters of the heart and the soul we need to work in greater depth. Scales, generalized measures and questionnaires do not penetrate deep enough to reach a person’s soul on its unique journey.

Treatment rests on the principles of exclusion while healing relies on the powers of inclusion. In treatment, what is seen as painful and undesirable, bothersome or even un-dignifying is fragmented from the whole and treated in isolation. Symptoms and ailments are medicated out of existence while the rest of the person is to carry on unchanged, as before. In healing work, we follow the movements of inclusion. We take symptoms seriously and embark on a relationship with them. We animate them and give them voice to converse with. We give them their space in exchange for their messages and wisdom. Rather than bothersome or superfluous, they are honored as messengers of the soul, in service of our own unconscious depths.

The way of approaching symptoms in the treatment model is aligned with an individualistic worldview that sees parts of any system as separate and autonomous from the whole they belong in. Healing follows a systemic worldview, where every part of the system bears an impact on the whole; any individual movement will affect the wider network it is an intrinsic part of. It recognizes the cause and effect of interconnectedness within the wider ecosystem of the Self and its surroundings. What is suppressed and excluded does not simply disappear, it returns in different forms. Until we receive and process the messages of our symptoms, the messengers will keep on coming. The process will need to repeat itself until we support the necessary changes that will allow a deeper order to be formed; a deeper sense of Self to emerge.

In the treatment paradigm, the agency is located primarily outside of us. It rests with a doctor, or a pill, or a course of treatment that we hope will free us from our unwanted symptoms. However, in the healing paradigm the primary agency rests inside of us. We might use pointers and guides from the outside, but the keys remain inside ourselves and the healing journey takes place firmly within. While entering our process of healing, we have to tread the paradox of retaining our agency whilst surrendering to the process within. This surrendering summons the inner healer that exists within the depths of us all, the one that knows what is truly needed and what is ready to be discarded, the one that carries nature’s wisdom through our bones. In the healing process, rather than stay who we were, we must shift and grow in new directions, becoming other aspects and versions of ourselves, rooted in greater service to our wholeness.

Treatment modalities render the emerging inner movement incomplete. Whatever has risen to meet us has been suppressed never to be truly seen or known. Whatever unconscious fact has been carried by our symptoms into consciousness has been silenced and its integration into consciousness remains incomplete. In healing, inner movements are followed through to completion as we strive to receive the guidance of our unconscious through our symptoms. Whilst in treatment the unconscious remains a separate and excluded part of the process, healing rests on a firm collaboration between our conscious and unconscious selves, with input from both and integration of the two.

Treatment engages the superficial layers of our being whereas healing engages us in much deeper ways, integrating the embodied, cognitive, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the Self. It often requires us to undertake a journey of deep inner transformation, as we move through to our core and undertake the treacherous journey back towards the surface. While the treatment paradigm follows a mechanical and linear path of progression that aims to keep the person as they were before, minus what they are treating, healing modalities embrace the cyclical nature of the inner journey and require of us nothing less than entering the cycles of death and rebirth. Death is not to be kept at bay, it is to be allowed as a natural and necessary part of the process; as a guide for awakening to a greater wisdom of how to live our lives in greater truth and fullness.

A treatment informed process rests on an overarching diagnostic story that moves towards specific goals and outcomes. It emphasizes remaining in control and moving through a set of certainties. A healing informed process rests on the interweaving of multiple and multilayered stories and works on a much wider scope. It is not aiming to remove our wounds, it is seeking to bring them back into a fertile state that supports further growth and life to spring out of them. This is an ongoing process, and whereas treatment exists at a fixed point in time, our engagement with the movements of healing is a lifelong journey that requires us to engage with the fullness of Self throughout our lives and its various cycles. The goal is the inner unfurling that occurs during the journey rather than the destination. It is a path that holds no certainties and rests on surrendering and on deep inner listening to what is ripe to emerge. A process that moves organically through both seeker and guide.  In contrast to the treatment modality that holds a clear boundary between patient and expert, the healing process is a joined journey between seeker and healer and has to move through both of them. Carl Jung has said:

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed”.

When life shakes our sense of wellbeing on any level, treatment might well be what is called for. Alongside treatment, healing might also be a necessary part of our way in and through. To keep engaging with the symbolic layers of life and the meaning making function us humans can thrive on, is to engage with the intuitive and the non-linear wisdom that lays within us. So far, the two modalities have been territorial and defensively dismissive of each other. Despite their differences, they both spring from a desire to be of service and to find ways to restore the human capacity or spirit, which are never really that far apart from each other. They need to work in close proximity as they are both of the world of repair and regeneration, but like the yin and yang, their different offerings bridge the opposites of this world. While treatment smooths over the cracks, healing is of the cracks. While treatment carries the burdens of its work in the container of certainty, healing trusts what emerges in the spaces of vulnerable uncertainty. This is not a call for integration between the two modalities, it is a call for respectful collaboration based on their particular remits; an acknowledgement of their individual limitations and strengths and a recognition that one cannot replace the other.