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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the realms of science and its inherent status and power that these fields aspire to, healing’s intuitive wisdom has been replaced by ‘clinical knowledge’ and ‘evidence-based’ practices.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.

Rites and Rituals

Rites and Rituals

by | Oct 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Systemic Family Constellations | 0 comments

Art by Stuart Griggs

Art by Stuart Griggs

Intentional rites and rituals are meaning carriers of great spiritual and psychological importance. They bring us back into belonging with the wider whole we are part of. As we call on the unseen to meet the seen, the higher and the lower worlds to meet us in the middle, we re-animate the world around us. We call everything back into life, into relationship and into co-creation.

For our early ancestors, ritual was the language for communing with the unseen. It held their prayers and offerings that appeased the Gods and Goddesses of disaster and called on the powers of protection. Ritual acts supported a complex emotional connection with the wider energies of life outside Self and community. They also weaved individual and tribal identities tightly together through their intrinsic meaning making process. Indigenous cultures and communities that have retained their links to the tribal soul keep their rites and rituals richly preserved and embedded into their social fabric of life. In the western world, ritual lineages have either been isolated from their spiritual and instinctive dimensions or have been completely forgotten and long-lost. Severed from our mythological and mystical roots, our spiritual capacity has been displaced from its rightful expressions.

Rituals are usually held by the wider container of ceremony or initiations and rites of passage. Our tribal ancestors knew that during transitions from one threshold to another, in order to preserve one from psychic injury, adequate containers are essential. Rites and rituals held the crucial tensions that underlie significant developmental transitions. They safeguarded a sacred and meaning-full space that supported the adult to emerge from the child, peeling back the layers of the Self into greater truth and maturity.

These rites are not to be romanticized in our yearnings for what we have lost. These initiations are bruising and painful transitions that require the shattering of what once was in order to re-assemble us into what will be. But the act of ceremony and ritual would render these spaces safe for surrendering one’s innocence and the community would be there to tend to the open wounds and transmit generational wisdom that would restore a new and yet ancient order of being. Rituals guarded the threshold between one way of being and another, one way of seeing and another, one way of living and another, holding the space sacred while a deep transformation was under way.

Our secular modern western culture has retained very little of our ceremonial past. What still remains has been mostly locked within the remits of organized religion, devoid of its once serving truth and purpose.  In the absence of collective initiation rites that mark the developmental transitions of life, young men and women seek these thresholds unconsciously through dangerous and self-destructive thrills, guided by a soul that seeks the next stage in its journey. The soul always remembers what we seem to have forgotten. But with no adequate internal or external guidance, these attempts remain incomplete and can fragment instead of deepening the Self.

Our Great Forgetting has left these forces to reach us only through fate, accidents, love and grief. These come complete with inner rituals and initiations that we tend to fear and medicalize, as we lack safe containers that can support us in offering ourselves to their transformative intentions. These archetypes of initiation unfold into inner rites of passage that can lead us into a greater knowing of ourselves and the world around us. Not always easy or palatable, they are tasked with ensuring we travel where we need to.

A ritual act is a form of soul prayer that ignites from the farthest, faintest recognition of Self deeply within and moves towards the greater collective soul of the entire universe. During inner work, ritual acts invite the wider forces to witness our journey and gift us something of the collective wisdom. They align our psychic energies with our intentions and amplify the potency of our work. They penetrate our ego structures and guide us through the liminal spaces between the worlds of reason, heart and soul, summoning buried layers of Self into action. These symbolic realms nourish our hidden depths and offer a safe container for opening up soulfully.

As we stand collectively at this point in time before the threshold of radical change on so many levels, the timeless wisdom of rites of passage can be a significant resource.  What we are collectively tasked with ahead is as old as earth herself. It rests on the elemental wisdom of ritual initiation spaces that restores our connection with the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Unless we recover conscious rituals around the cycles of renewal we will lose our direction in our experience of the visceral flow of life. Restoring our ritual connection to the thresholds of death and rebirth opens us up to receiving the gift of life.

Healing the Ancestral Heart

Healing the Ancestral Heart

by | Dec 1, 2018 | Collective Consciousness, Depth Psychology, integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Systemic Family Constellations | 0 comments

 

Image by Paul Lewin

We all come from a long line of ancestors, of fates and stories once told and later lost. However lost and forgotten our ancestral past may be, it still lives through us, mostly unconscious and unexplored. Our lives are influenced by events and experiences that happened to others in a distant past and we are seeding imprints for others in a distant future.

We have learned to experience ourselves in a fragmented way, contained within the remits of our personal life, from birth to death, but there are far wider influences at hand. There is a wider story of who we are that has been writing itself from one generation to the next. A thread of living that binds us to experiences that have existed beyond the years we have personally lived through.

We have grown out of the roots and soil of our family tree and its sap of life and nourishment, its consciousness, runs through us. It determines how we move through life, and affects us in ways we don’t immediately recognize or understand. By inhabiting the wider narrative of where we came from and of those that came before us, we come to find our rightful place at the forefront of our ancestral line. We come to restore within us a deep sense of belonging to something greater, a homecoming on a soul level that aligns us to our own purpose in life. This is the journey of weaving ourselves into a greater wholeness.

To re-member the long line of people we have descended from, to acknowledge how many connections it took for us to arrive, to appreciate the life and death cycles that have supported our emergence, helps us witness the enormity of being alive, here and now. We didn’t just happen, we have been happening all along. And like our ancestors, in the mists of time ahead, we too are going to occupy that place of the unseen and the unspoken.

Until we face and process the lives and fates of those that came before us, our path in life will be influenced in ways that don’t fully belong to us. By turning towards our ancestors, we find the collective imprints of wounding and patterns of healing our life has rested on. Trauma travels down the family line, silently moving from one generation to the next, until someone in the line is sufficiently resourced to be able to face what has been trying to reach some level of resolution.

The trauma of our family line might have been on a personal or a collective level. It might have descended from the fate of an ancestor, or from the fate and trauma of a whole country. The pain of those that survived or those that didn’t. The traveling wounds of war and genocide, of migration and displacement. These points of psychic fracture move forward down the life line to remind and forewarn those ahead of the dangers in which they lived or perished. Each generation equipping the next to deal with what they knew life to be. Because the ancestral field is truly benign and the deepest longing of our ancestors is for subsequent generations to thrive, in that way they too live through us.

In the realm of the soul, time is not a linear dimension. Here past, present and future coexist at any given moment. Pain and healing travel through the forces of time and cellular memory backward and forward from their source of origin. The systemic consciousness is acutely aware of any exclusions or misalignments in the family line, and will engage future generations to restore any sense of incompleteness. We are all part of an ancestral super-organism that abides by the deeper laws of nature. The laws of interconnectedness that require us to see further than we are used to, with eyes that penetrate through time and artificial boundaries.

Current epigenetic research is starting to catch up with the tribal notions of the interconnectedness that binds the ancestral field. Nothing exists in isolation and when we work on ourselves we do it in service of those that came before us and of those that are yet to emerge. Our inner work is in service of the consciousness that runs through the systems we belong to. In service of the deepest yearning of the soul, integration and completeness. In inner work we are truly dealing with the infinite and the unbound.