Tag: psychology

Psychology 101: My culture is inside me

moe Leave a comment

Throughout my daily life, I notice parts of me responding to situations, people, and trains of thought. Mostly, these parts respond with judgments. They are not aligned with my “global” or conscious view. And they come from my culture.

I notice them. Flash on where they come from. Notice what’s more true for me. And they are gone.

WHAT ARE THESE THOUGHTS?

As mentioned, these thoughts are mostly judgments.

She is fat. (And that’s bad.) He is ugly. (Bad.)

She is young, slim, and attractive. (Good.) He is well dressed. (Good.)

If I eat fast food, I am one of those people. (Bad.)

They are at that restaurant, so they must be sophisticated. (Good.)

He is Muslim. (Dangerous.) She looks unkept. (Not good.)

And so on.

WHY DOES IT HAPPEN?

So why does this happen?

It’s because we learn from others. Our mind absorbs whatever is out there in the culture – from family, school, friends, media, movies, books, lyrics, and so on.

And the more often we are exposed to it, and the more charge it has (even if we just see it having charge for the other person), the more likely it is to go in and come up again.

The job of our mind is to absorb it all and then give it back to us whenever it’s relevant. (And sometimes when it’s not obviously relevant!)

It’s natural and essentially innocent.

RELATE TO IT MORE CONSCIOUSLY

Although if we join in with these thoughts and act on them, that can be quite harmful to ourselves (psychologically) and others (in life and society).

So it’s good to find a more conscious relationship to these dynamics.

I can notice these thoughts and reactions in me.

And I can find what’s more true for me than the stereotypes these thoughts typically reflect.

I can relate more intentionally to the way different parts of me respond to something.

THE BIGGER PICTURE: THE WORLD IS MY MIRROR

There is a bigger picture here.

The world is my mirror. Whatever characteristics and dynamics I see “out there” in others and the world are also here in me. They may be expressed in different situations and in different ways. And the essence is the same. (For instance, whenever I react with aversion to someone or something, the essence of that reaction is often the same as what I am reacting to. I am doing the same as what I see out there in that moment.)

And it’s all happening within my sense fields. To me, others and the world happen within and as my mental field and sometimes my other sense fields. It’s happening within and as what I am. It’s happening within and as the consciousness I am. “Out there” is really “here”. “He she it they” is really “me”.

INTERNALIZATION AND OVER-I

I like to use simple and ordinary language and avoid jargon, but I want to mention a couple of things.

This is often called internalization. We internalize our culture and it lives on in us. It’s how culture is passed on and it’s how we can have a culture in the first place.

And it’s also what Freud called the over-I or – through mistranslation – the superego. The essence of his insights is often valuable, although some of what comes from him are specific to his own culture, and there are simpler and more effective ways to do therapy.

Note: After writing this, a video on this topic popped up on YouTube. From 1-10 how racists are you (Cut). It’s good to see that many these days are aware of unconscious biases that we pick up and learn from the society we live in, and actively seek to be aware of them and counter them.

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tagged: culture, inquiry, life 101, projections, psych 101, psychology, sigmund freud, society, the work of byron katie, who and what we are, world as a mirror   

Does explaining through psychology remove the mystery and magic from life?

moe Leave a comment

I saw a post on social media about how psychologizing everything removes the magic and mystery of life.

That’s not how it is for me.

WHEN UNDERSTANDING REMOVES THE MYSTERY

Yes, if you assume that your psychological explanations are correct and true and all there is, then it does remove a sense of mystery and magic. But that’s out of alignment with reality. That is pretending that our maps are more than they are. It goes against common sense and the essence of science.

WHEN UNDERSTANDING GOES HAND-IN-HAND WITH THE MYSTERY

For me, exploring through the lens of psychology – as I do in most of my writings – goes hand-in-hand with mystery.

It’s an exploration.

What comes out of it are maps with all of the benefits and limitations inherent in maps. They are different in kind from what they are about. They highlight some things and leave in infinite amount out. They are guesses about the world. They have a practical function only, to help us navigate and function in he world. They are provisional and have temporary value only. They cannot hold any full, final, or absolute truth. Reality is always more than and different from any map.

This context is more aligned with reality.

And it keeps the mystery and magic in life.

APPLIED TO AWAKENING

I write about awakening in some of these articles. And when I do, I often create a map of some aspects of awakening.

For instance, both in direct noticing and through logic, we find we are consciousness. If we “have” consciousness, then to ourselves we have to BE consciousness. The world, to us, happens within and as consciousness. It happens within and as the consciousness we are. The world, to us, appears as consciousness. The consciousness we are is one. So we are the oneness the world, to us, happens within and as.

This fits what mystics across times and cultures describe.

It’s a psychological way to understand awakening, and it fits perfectly with a wide range of worldviews – from materialism to a spirituality that sees all of existence as the divine.

Does this remove the mystery or magic from awakening? Or from life?

It could… if I pretend I know that this is how it is and that this is all there is. But I would have to do a lot of pretending for that to be the case.

In reality, it’s a guess. It’s a map for practical and temporary use only. It opens for and fits a wide range of worldviews. And it’s compatible with a more spiritual understanding of the world.

It’s open to the mystery and magic of awakening and existence.

tagged: essential topic, inquiry, maps, mystery of existence, psychology, stories, talking about   

Why do most scientists and psychologists ignore our nature?

moe Leave a comment

To me, there is something that seems clear, both from direct noticing and logic.

And that is what we are to ourselves, and what the world is to us. It’s our own nature, and the nature of the world as it appears to us.

WHAT I AM IN MY OWN NOTICING

In one sense, I am a human being in the world. That’s not wrong, and it’s an assumption that helps this human self orient and function in the world.

And yet, in my own direct noticing, it is what I most fundamentally am?

When I look, I find I am something else.

I find I am more fundamentally capacity for any and all experience. I am what allows and takes the form of any and all of my experiences. I am what allows and takes the form of what happens in all of my sense fields, in sight, sound, sensation, smell, taste, and the mental field. (And any other sense fields we can differentiate out through our mental overlays.)

I am what the world, to me, happens within and as.

I am the oneness the world, to me happens within and as.

We can call this different things. For instance, consciousness.

And that brings us to the logic side of this.

WHAT I AM LOGICALLY

In our culture, most say that “we have consciousness” as if it’s a kind of appendix we happen to have. There is an assumption here that we are primarily a physical object and this physical object somehow has consciousness as it happens to have arms, legs, and physical organs.

This is a third-person view, and it doesn’t really matter in this context how accurate it is.

The more interesting question for me is: What are we to ourselves, in our own immediate experience?

Logically, if we “have” consciousness, we have to BE consciousness. There is nothing outside of consciousness somehow experiencing consciousness. What experiences and has the idea of consciousness is consciousness itself. Not anything outside of it.

Any experience happens within and as consciousness. It’s consciousness taking the form of that experience.

So to us, the world happens within and as consciousness.

The world, and any experience, happens within and as what we are.

We ARE consciousness and the world and any content of experience happens within and as consciousness, within and as what we are.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WHAT WE ARE

Both direct noticing and (this particular) logic arrives at the same answer for what we are to ourselves, and it also arrives at the same answer for the characteristics of what we are.

What are some of the characteristics of what we are to ourselves?

What are some of the characteristics of consciousness?

To me, what I am has no beginning or end in space. It also has no beginning or end in time. Any experience of space and time happens within and as what I am.

To me, I am one. I am the oneness the world happens within and as. I am what my field of experience, which my mental field differentiates in many different ways, happens within and as.

To me, I am the world and the world is me. The world happens within and as what I am.

To me, the world happens within and as consciousness. It’s like a dream in that way.

To me, any and all content of experience comes and goes. And this includes any ideas of what I may be within the content of experience (this human self) and what these ideas refer to. In some cases, I may not take myself to be this particular human self, for instance in a dream, and what I more fundamentally am is still here. What any and all experiences happens within and as is still here. (Including shifting ideas of what I am as an object in the world.)

When what I am notices itself, I find that my nature is what can be called love. It’s a love that’s not dependent on shifting states or emotions. It’s the love of the left hand removing a splinter from the right. And this love is often obscured by separation consciousness, by dynamics and patterns created from when I took myself most fundamentally as a separate object in the world.

IS THIS WHAT I “REALLY” AM?

So is this what I really am?

Yes, it is. It’s what I am in my own direct noticing.

Outside of that, I don’t know. I don’t know what my nature more fundamentally happens to be from some kind of outside third-person view. And that’s also less important, at least in my daily life.

WHY DON’T WE ALWAYS NOTICE?

If this is so obvious both in terms of noticing and logic, why don’t we always notice or take this into account?

Most likely, because we live in a culture and world where most don’t. When we grow up, we do as others do. We learn to take on and operate from separation consciousness. And that can be very convincing, at least until we start examining our assumptions – about what we are and what the world is to us – a little more closely.

IS IT IMPORTANT?

Yes and no. We humans obviously get by without noticing or examining our nature.

And yet, when the oneness we are notices itself, keeps noticing itself, and explores how to live from this noticing, it can be profoundly transforming.

It can be profoundly transforming for our perception, sense of fundamental identity, life in the world, and our human psychology.

WHY DO MANY OVERLOOK OR DENY THIS?

If this is so obvious, both in terms of noticing and logic, why do so many ignore or deny this?

Most people are not so interested in the question of what they more fundamentally are in their own immediate experience. That’s fine. They get by anyway. They have more immediate concerns to focus on and take care of.

And yet, for some people, this is their job. For scientists and especially psychologists, this is essential to their job and (I assume) interests.

So why don’t more of them explore this? Why don’t more of them take it seriously?

I am not sure.

The essential answer may be the same as above: We live in a world where we are trained in separation consciousness from we are born. It becomes the norm, so we don’t even consider questioning it. And if we do, we feel we are somehow transgressing and entering dangerous waters so we don’t take it very far or speak about it.

To elaborate a bit:

Exploring these things is a kind of taboo in our culture, especially in academic circles. It goes against our shared worldview. It goes against standard norms. (Although all of that is changing.)

Our western culture, and especially our scientific culture, value the more “objective” third-person view over first-person explorations. Again, this has been different in the past and will very likely be different in the future.

If you work as a scientist in academia or as a psychologist, you typically cannot stray too far from the mainstream. As a scientist, you risk losing (or not getting) funding. You even risk losing your job if you get too weird. And as a psychologist, you risk losing your license. (In Norway, psychologists have lost their license for exploring the possibility of past lives in therapy sessions, even if these explorations obviously deal with projections and don’t say whether or not the past lives were real or not.)

In short, cultures are systems and systems want to stay mostly stable. There are many mechanisms operating to preserve some kind of stability. There are many incentives to not explore this, and not so many opportunities or invitations to do so. (Which, again, is fortunately changing.)

At a more personal level, many people may not have the curiosity or passion for exploring this. They are happy exploring other things, and that’s fine. Not everyone needs to explore these things.

WILL THIS CHANGE?

Will this change?

It is already changing. More and more people, including in science and psychology, are interested in a more transpersonal approach and understanding.

I envision a future where the third-person and first-person approaches exist side-by-side and even hand-in-hand, including in science and psychology.

It will be a far more rich exploration of our human experience, and one that reflects a little more of the bigger picture.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE VALIDITY OF WHAT MYSTICS DESCRIBE

If or when this shift happens, something else will happen as well.

And that is an acknowledgment – in science and our culture – of the validity in what mystics across times and cultures have described.

If we look at the essence of what mystics describe, it’s exactly this.

We are consciousness, and the world to us is consciousness.

We are the oneness the world, to us, happens within and as.

Image: Created by me and Midjourney (AI image)

tagged: awakening, big mind, big mind process, culture, culture change, essential topic, headless way, psychology, science, society, who and what we are   

We sometimes create what we fear

moe Leave a comment

This is a classic from literature and psychology: We sometimes create what we fear.

EXAMPLES

Here are a few examples:

We fear not being supported, so we push people away before they have a chance to support us. We expect them to not support us, so we get angry and push them away before they can disprove our story.

We fear and expect not to be understood. So we don’t put real effort into being understood, which increases the chances of people not understanding us. We give up sooner than we would have if we didn’t have that issue.

We fear not being accepted so we people-please. This may lead people to keep some distance from us since they notice we are not completely authentic. It makes us question if we are really accepted by others since we present a somewhat fake facade to them. People-pleasing also means we set aside our own needs, which means we won’t feel completely accepted since we don’t fully accept ourselves, we don’t accept and take our own needs seriously.

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

When these dynamics happen, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We set the stage to prove to ourselves that what the issue is telling us is true. It maintains the issue. And it feels familiar and even safe to us because we stay in the same familiar loop.

We reduce the risk of having life disprove what the issue tells us, and get into unfamiliar identities.

WHY DOES IT HAPPEN?

It’s often a circular dynamic. We grew up with certain family dynamics, internalized these, act as if our fearful beliefs are true and our identity around it is who we are, set the stage to get our fears confirmed, and increase our chances for just that happening. We recreate the dynamics we are familiar with, even if they are painful.

Another side of this has to do with motivation and skills. If we are used to not being heard and understood, or not being taken seriously, we may feel hopeless about being heard and understood so we give up early in the process, and we may not develop the necessary skills to be properly heard and understood.

INVITATION FOR HEALING

There is a healing impulse in this, and an invitation for healing.

We get to face our fears more often. The invitation here is to get more familiar with it and perhaps see it’s not quite as terrible as our more catastrophic stories about it. We may even learn to navigate this particular terrain a bit better.

More importantly, we get to face our issue and how it plays out in our life. We are invited to identify and explore the issue and what’s behind it, and find a resolution for it. Life shows us what’s going on and we have an opportunity to do something about it.

OTHER WAYS IT PLAYS OUT IN THE WORLD…

The self-fulfilling dynamic is just one way these issues can play out.

For instance, we may have a fear of not being understood, so we go to great lengths to be understood. Here, we are setting the stage for another experience. We may still have the issue, but we act against it.

It’s healthier in some ways, although it does come with its own challenges. For instance, the stress of the issue is still there. Also, our behavior tends to have a compulsive quality which can lead to ill-considered actions and pushback from others.

…AND EVEN THEN LIVING THIS PATTERN

Even here, we are actually living the self-fulfilling prophecy although in a less visible way.

In the example above, we don’t fully understand ourselves. We haven’t completely understood the issue and what it’s about, so we are acting on our habitual way of relating to it.

Similarly, if our issue is to not be supported and we make sure we have plenty of support in our life, we are still living the self-fulfilling prophecy. We are not properly supporting ourselves. If we did, we wouldn’t need to compulsively seek support in the world. If we did, we would resolve the issue.

And as mentioned above, if our issue is not feeling seen, heard, and understood, we may make a great deal of effort in being seen, heard, and understood. This helps our life in the world, but we are not really hearing, seeing, and understanding ourselves. To do so would mean thoroughly exploring the issue and through that finding a resolution for it.

We give to ourselves what we are looking for in the world, and that’s the real medicine for healing.

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tagged: life 101, psych 101, psychology, self-fulfilling prophecy   

Let’s be scared together!

moe Leave a comment

In a recent Star Trek Discovery episode (S04E08), Stamets and Culber have a dialog.

Culber is experiencing guilt and anxiety, and instead of trying to make it go away, Stamets lists the reasons he too experiences anxiety and says: Let’s be scared together! (Paraphrased.)

It’s beautiful to see this type of mature interaction in a TV series or movie and shows that at least one of the writers on the series has some good psychological insight. It does reflect a fashionable approach within psychology, especially on the US west coast, and it also reflects timeless human wisdom.

When we are experiencing something difficult, what we often most need is just to be with someone. We don’t necessarily need to fix it. We may not need solutions. At least not right away. And we definitely don’t need someone to minimize it, pretend it’s not valid, or “fix” it with an overly sunny look at the situation. We need company.

And that’s how it is with our inner community as well. When we have anxiety, distress, anger, or something else coming up, what these parts of us most need – at first – is for us to be with them. To allow. Witness. Know that it’s OK to experience these things. And so on.

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tagged: allowing, be with, culture, pop culture, psychology, society   

Why are we fascinated by stories of crime and mystery?

moe Leave a comment

Why is the crime and mystery genre so popular?

I don’t have any original suggestions, but I guess it’s because…

We are fascinated by mysteries. This may be built into us through evolution since it gives us a survival advantage to find answers to mysteries. Knowing something gives us an advantage over not knowing it.

Stories tell us something about life. Being drawn to and fascinated by stories helps us learn something about our culture, about people, about life, and ourselves. This too gives us a survival advantage and may well be built into us through evolution.

Stories can help us get in touch with different sides of ourselves. Just like a dream, all the different characters, settings, and dynamics in a story reflect something in us and our life. This is inherently fascinating, even if we are unaware of this aspect of it.

It’s part of our current western culture. We may have childhood memories of watching, reading, or listening to mysteries and it feels familiar and comfortable.

It’s comforting to see fiction crime solved. It gives us a temporary sense that everything, or at least something, is right with the world. (There is a reason there is a resolution to nearly 100% of crime and mystery stories. It feels more satisfying to most people.)

If it’s part of a series with recurrent characters, the setting can feel comfortable and familiar.

If we experience our life as generally safe and predictable, it can give us a temporary sense of suspense and mystery. It balances out our daily life.

It’s a distraction from our own life. It’s fascinating. It’s not our life. So it helps us temporarily “forget” about our own life with our all-too-familiar challenges, boredom, or whatever it may be.

Image: From NRK’s radio drama Jernvognen.

The seed for this article: During a recent illness, I got back into listening to old classic Norwegian radio drama from NRK.

tagged: culture, psychology   

James Hillman: Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul

moe Leave a comment

Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard… The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse.

– James Hillman

When we have symptoms like depression, anxiety, unease, and so on, it points to something deeper. There is an invitation there to see what it’s about. And that exploration has many layers.

SHIFTS IN OUR HUMAN LIFE

Our symptoms may encourage or invite us to… Clarify our priorities and reorganize our lives to match our more authentic and real priorities. Make changes in our life in terms of where we live, our relationships, our work, and so on. Engage in a deeper healing journey and exploration. Find healing for how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

In general, they are an invitation for honesty, receptivity, authenticity, and healing.

NOTICING WHAT WE ARE

There is also a deeper invitation here, and that is to notice our more fundamental nature.

As long as we take ourselves to most fundamentally be something within the content of our experience – this human self, an I, a me, a doer, an observer, and so on – there will be some unease in our experience. Something is off, and somewhere in us is a knowing that something is off.

This is a symptom that can lead us to notice what we more fundamentally are in our own experience. It’s an exploration of oneness and love, living from oneness and love, and allowing our human self and psyche to transform within oneness and love.

WHO AND WHAT WE ARE

Psychological symptoms are an invitation for exploration as a human being in the world. To be more honest with ourselves, sincere, receptive. To find a deeper authenticity. To find healing for how we relate to the world. To find healing for certain issues in us.

And they are also an invitation to look a little closer at what we are in our own first-person experience. As long as we don’t, and even if we live an authentic life and are mostly healed as a human being, there will always be an underlying sense of unease and something being off.

CURE OF SYMPTOMS?

Hillman refers to “cure of symptoms” while knowing there is no cure at the level of symptoms.

We can, of course, TRY to cure symptoms through medications, distractions, superficial changes, and so on. But it doesn’t really work.

If something is off – either in a conventional sense or in our perception of what we most fundamentally are – it will still be off, and there will be symptoms.

If we try to “cure” symptoms and nothing more, they will show up again or in another way.

Life is persistent. Life won’t let us get away with superficial solutions for very long.

That persistence is our nemesis as long as we ignore it or run from it.

And it becomes a blessing to the extent we take it as an opportunity for a more sincere and honest exploration.

Note: Some physical illnesses trigger psychological symptoms, so it’s good to check this possibility as well. When I had lyme disease and confections, I also felt in turmoil emotionally, which is a common symptom. As I see it, the infections trigger something already there and doesn’t really produce it. So I approached it from both angles: trying to cure the infections and working on my relationship with the symptoms.

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tagged: invitation, james hillman, psychology, quote, who and what we are   

Psych 101: Differentiating feelings and thoughts

moe

One of the basics of practical daily-life psychology is to differentiate feelings and thoughts.

BASIC EMOTION CATEGORIES

In our culture, we tend to differentiate emotions into sadness, anger, joy, grief, and so on. And there may be variations of these like frustration which can be seen as a form of anger.

Anything beyond that is a story. It may be a story about why we feel the way we do, what it means, and so on.

DIFFERENTIATING EMOTIONS AND STORIES

If we say “I feel you don’t love me anymore” or “I feel you did this to damage our relationship”, then we mix up feelings and stories. Yes, there is probably a feeling there. And no, we don’t feel this. We have a story saying this.

By mixing them up, we muddle the situation. And by learning to differentiate the two, we can more easily deal with what’s happening. We may notice a thought that the other person doesn’t love us anymore. We may notice sadness and fear coming from that thought. We may notice it’s more of a question than a statement. We may realize there may be other things going on. (For instance, the other may react to their own fearful stories, or it may be they don’t love some of our words and actions and it’s not that they don’t love us.) And we can more easily explore what’s going on with the other.

It’s more helpful to differentiate emotions and stories. We can say “I feel sad and I have a story that…”. It’s more close to reality, and it opens our mind up to hold the stories a little more lightly and explore them with more receptivity.

EMOTIONAL REASONING

This is closely related to emotional reasoning.

We feel something, it’s mixed up with a story, and the emotions make the story seem more true.

I feel it’s true so it must be true.

What we overlook here is that an emotion in itself is simple and doesn’t mean anything. It’s the stories we attach to it that gives it meaning. And these stories may not be true in the way we take them to be.

EVEN THE BASIC EMOTIONS HAVE A STORY COMPONENT

We may notice that what goes into the emotion category is somewhat arbitrary. We can differentiate five or ten or fifty different emotions.

From here, we may look a bit more closely and find that even conventional emotion labels like sadness, anger, joy, and so on have a story component. They are sensations that our thoughts put a label and story on.

PARTS LANGUAGE

Personally, I find parts language helpful.

If I say “I am sad”, there is a tendency to identify with the emotions. I take myself to be the emotion, at least for a while. This comes with a tendency to act on or react to the emotion. (And, really, I identify with certain stories connected to the emotion and the way these stories view the world.)

If I instead say “a part of me feels sad” there is a bit more space around it and it’s easier for me to see it as something that happens in my experience and is passing through. It’s not what I am. It’s something I experience. It’s a guest. It’s easier to relate to it more intentionally.

STORIES CREATING EMOTIONS

We may also find that stories we hold as true create emotions.

If we hold a stressful story as true, it tends to create corresponding emotions. And our mind may then take these emotions as a confirmation that the story is true. I feel that it’s true so it must be true.

Here, it’s helpful to take a step back, identify with story or stories behind the emotion, and examine these to see how they fit with what’s more honestly true for us.

DIFFERENTIATING EMOTIONS AND THOUGHTS

All of this is about differentiating emotions and thoughts, and exploring their relationship.

We can differentiate basic emotions and any stories we have related to what they are about, what they mean, and so on.

We can explore how our stories, when held as true, create certain emotions.

We can explore the story component of even basic emotions. What do we find? Physical sensations with a label attached to it calling it anger, sadness, or something else?

We can use parts language to help us relate to emotions more intentionally.

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tagged: life 101, psych 101, psychology   

Psych 101: Assigning unconscious motivation to others

moe Leave a comment

I thought I would write a few posts on more practical daily-life psychology. In this case, about assigning unconscious motivations to others.

ASSIGNING UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVATIONS TO OTHERS

If we know a little about psychology, it may be tempting to sometimes assign unconscious motivations to others. You did Y, and it’s because you subconsciously want to X.

As usual, a little knowledge can be dangerous. And there are some inherent problems in this no matter how experienced we are with exploring the human psyche.

HOW IT MAY BE HELPFUL

In rare situations, guessing about unconscious motivations can be helpful.

Especially, if we ask for it, and it’s framed as a gently held question.

For instance, in a therapy session, there is a chance these guesses can read to useful explorations and insights. And sometimes, the insight may be that we cannot know, or that something else seems more plausible.

WHEN IT’S NOT HELPFUL

But if we don’t ask for it. If there are far more obvious and simple explanations. And if it’s framed as a statement and not a question. Then it’s not very helpful.

It’s typically not helpful any time we are outside of a therapy session, and sometimes it’s not even helpful within a therapy setting.

Why? Because we cannot know for certain. We are guessing and our guess is colored by our worldview, how we see humans, and whatever psychological tradition we are familiar with. It can often distract from a more simple, pragmatic, and effective approach. And it can bring people to doubt and second-guess themselves in a way that’s not so helpful.

HOW IT’S MORE LIKELY TO BE HELPFUL

There is one way these assumptions can be made helpful, and that is to see what’s going on and use it as a mirror for ourselves.

We can recognize it as a guess, a story, and something that happens in our mental field. It’s here to help us orient and explore something. It may have limited validity and reality is always more and different. What our story tells us is not inherent in reality or the other person.

We can use it as a mirror. If I turn this story to myself, what do I find? Can I find specific examples of when and how it was true?

We can notice how we are capacity for this story, as we are capacity for any experience. And how it happens within and as what we are, as every experience of anything does.

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tagged: life 101, psych 101, psychology   

What Jung left out

moe Leave a comment

I was passionate about CG Jung in my teens and twenties and devoured dozens of his books. (Mostly based on series of talks on different subjects.)

Even then, it was clear to me that he left out something essential: What we are.

His focus was on our psyche and finding wholeness within our psyche.

This is obviously very important, and it’s an essential part of psychological health and well-being. For most people, working on this is more than enough to find a deeper sense of satisfaction, meaning, and groundedness in their life.

And what he left out is what we more fundamentally are, in our own first-person experience. He left out finding ourselves as that which allows any and all experiences, and that which forms itself into any and all of our experiences. That which allows the world – this human self, the wider world, and anything else – as it appears to us, and that which forms itself into the world as it appears to us.

Why? Probably because he too was a child of his culture and time.

Of course, it’s easy enough for us to add this dimension. It doesn’t change what he talked about, it just adds a different context for it

Note: He may have been on the verge of discovering this extra dimension judging from a dream he had. In his dream, he saw himself asleep in meditation posture in a cave and knew that if the meditator woke up, he – the one he took himself to be – would die. In reality, it’s a bit less dramatic although it can be experienced as dramatic enough. What dies is taking ourselves most fundamentally as something within the content of our experience, this human self.

tagged: c.g. jung, psychology, who and what we are   

A cultural bias in favor of being outgoing

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There are several things to explore here.

JUNG

When Jung introduced the words introverted and extraverted, he referred to where we tend to place our attention. Do we tend to focus on what’s happening around us? (Extraverted.) Or do we tend to focus on what’s going on inside of us? (Introverted.)

This has very little to do with how most people today use the words, for instance as being outgoing (extraverted) or quiet (introverted) in social settings.

A BIAS IN OUR CULTURE

Also, this highlights an obvious bias in our western culture. We tend to see being outgoing as good and desirable, and being quiet in social settings as undesirable and even something to fix.

In reality, both are fine and have their strengths and weaknesses. We all have both sides in us. And the only problem may be if we get “stuck” in one or the other due to identities, wounds, reactivity to our own discomfort, and so on.

The more healthy we are, the more fluid we can be in how we access our outgoing sides or more quiet, receptive, and contemplative sides.

WHY THIS BIAS?

Why do we have this bias in our western culture? One guess is that it’s connected to patriarchy and a tendency to see traditionally “masculine” characteristics (outgoing) as more desirable than traditionally “feminine” characteristics (receptive, quiet).

In my experience, it seems that this tendency is stronger in empires like Britain and the US, with their glorification of strength, power, assertiveness, and so on.

CHANGES IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA?

The tendency of mainstream media to focus on how to be more outgoing is natural. It reflects the general bias in our culture, and it is fortunately changing. I see more and more articles in mainstream media about how to shift into receptivity, silence, and listening.

This is probably, in part, supported by the more general acceptance of mindfulness, meditation, and so on.

HOW WE CAN FIND MORE COMFORT WITH BOTH

We may already be comfortable with being outgoing in some situations, and more receptive and quiet in other. We may already have some fluidity between the two.

If not, if we notice we seem a bit “stuck” in one or the other, independent of situations, how can we find more freedom around it?

The answer is, as usual, to identify what stops us – stressful beliefs, wounds, and so on, and investigate these, create the conditions for a shift in our relationship to them, and invite them to resolve and dissolve.

I won’t go into more details here since many or most other articles on this site are about aspects of this process.

tagged: c.g. jung, psychology   

Article: Meditation-related difficulties

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This is not surprising. Many forms of meditation open us up to whatever is here, including unprocessed wounds. That’s why it’s good to study with someone who is honest about this upfront and experienced in guiding people through whatever may come up.

See Meditation-Related Adverse Effects: Prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects in a population-based sample in the United States by Goldberg, Lam, Britton, and Davidson

A FEW MORE THOUGHTS

It’s very natural to experience some discomfort in meditation. After all, we are faced with whatever is here and whatever we previously avoided through distractions.

What comes up can range from mild restlessness, uneasiness, or discomfort. To memories of specific events we haven’t found complete peace with. To unprocessed sadness, grief, anger, remorse, guilt, shame, and so on. To deep and overwhelming trauma.

We may also have an opening to what we really are, which for many is pleasant, and for some can be disorienting or even profoundly disturbing.

As the article says, it’s important to identify people at higher risk for serious meditation-related difficulties, and these include people with a troubled childhood, developmental trauma, and perhaps emotional instability, trouble functioning well in daily life, and so on.

I should also mention that if we are serious about our practice, and life wants to awaken and live from that awakening through this human self, then we eventually have to face whatever is unprocessed in us and allow it to join in with the awakening.

tagged: meditation, psychology   

Why is / was there a stigma against psychotherapy?

moe Leave a comment

Nowadays, it’s more accepted and even encouraged to see a therapist, especially in the US. But there is still some left of the old stigma against therapy.

Where does that stigma or skepticism come from?

Some early therapists – in the 1800s and early 1900s – had a more cynical view on humans. This colored people’s perception of therapy in general, and it’s something many of us instinctually want to avoid.

We may have a cynical view on humans and reality. We may think that uncovering and getting close to reality will only confirm that we and/or reality is bad. We don’t trust human nature and reality.

We know we may not get a good or compatible therapist, and a bad therapist is worse than nothing. It can make things worse.

We may see it as only dealing with problems and challenges, and not (also) helping us to thrive and function better in daily life with more joy, sense of meaning, and passion.

We may know or suspect that being honest about our feelings, thoughts, and knowing may require us to act on it and make changes in our life, and we may be scared of making those changes.

All of these reasons are valid and understandable. I know each of these from myself. I instinctually recoil from some of the worldviews and views of humans found in early psychology. I used to have a lack of trust in that uncovering and getting close to reality would be good. I have experience with bad and incompatible therapists and have learned to be more discerning. Some therapists do deal mostly with problems and not helping people thrive. And I have been scared of acting on my own knowing, and have had a counselor who brought me face-to-face with it in an unavoidable way (for which I am grateful).

Why has it changed? Perhaps largely because therapy has changed. There is a more life-affirming view on humans and reality in most contemporary psychology and therapy.

Note: I chose to use imprecise words like good and bad here since this is about perception and often very innocent and childlike perceptions and reactions.

tagged: psychology, psychotherapy, society, therapy   

Reflections on society, politics and nature XXXVI

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This is one in a series of posts with brief notes on society, politics, and nature. I sometimes include short personal notes as well. Click “read more” to see all the entries.

POLITICAL DIMENSIONS I FIND USEFUL

There are some political dimensions I find as useful as the conventional ones.

The main one may be inclusiveness. Is this policy aimed at benefiting all life, as far as possible? Or is it aimed at benefiting one particular group at the expense of others? Of course, we may not be able to find policies that always benefit everyone, but we can do our best. And when I say all life, I mean all life – including non-human species and future generations.

Another is reality orientation. Is this view or policy grounded in reality? Is it grounded in science? Or is it based on ideology, logical fallacies, misinformation, or conspiracy theories?

And yet another is democracy. Does this policy, party, or politician aim to deepen and strengthen democracy? Or does it aim to undermine it?

The first one has been important to me since my mid-teens. The second has become more salient and relevant in our post-truth era. And the third has similarly become relevant due to anti-democracy forces that are both unintentional (social media, echo chambers) and intentional (weaponized fake news, conspiracy theories, troll farms), and leaders of democracies that actively undermine these democracies like Trump and Putin.

Click READ MORE to see more entries in this post.

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tagged: pandemic, politics, psychology, reflections on society, society   

Victor Frankl: When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves

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When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

– Victor Frankl

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I wanted to learn about psychology. Through grace, the first books I found — on my mother’s bookshelf – was Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. I was very fortunate that he was my first formal introduction to psychology.

tagged: psychology, victor frankl   

Analyzing vs resolving our issues

moe Leave a comment

It’s a common stereotype that traditional Freudian analysis lines the pockets of the analyst while offering insights to the client and no real resolution. I suspect there is a lot of truth to this, with the caveat that I don’t have personal experience with Freudian analysis.

Analysis and insight at a story level is just the first step in resolving our issues. It gives us an idea of what to work on. For any real and more thorough resolution, we have to go further and typically use other approaches.

What are these other approaches? It can be a range of different things and depends on the person, the issue, and what’s available.

Here are some examples:

Act in spite of our fears. Act as we imagine we would act without the issue. Try it out. Make small steps. (I am sure this one often is part of psychoanalysis sessions.)

Engage in dialog with the different parts of us, and the different parts of the issue. Take the role of the different parts of our mind. (Voice Dialog, Big Mind process, Internal Family Systems).

Use heart-centered approaches like ho’oponopono or Tonglen. This can be deeply transformative and helps us transform our relationship to the issue, the person or situation the issue seems to be about, ourselves, others, and the world, and it also transforms the issue itself.

Release tension and trauma out of the body through, for instance, therapeutic tremoring (TRE). Over time, this can take some or most of the charge out of the issue.

Go further in exploring how the mind creates its own experience of the issue. See how the mind associates sensations with thoughts to give the thoughts a charge and create the issue. See the associations the mind has around it, holding it in place. Find underlying beliefs and identifications, also holding it in place. This can be done with the Living Inquiries.

Identify and examine stressful and painful stories and beliefs holding the issue in place, for instance through The Work.

Use energy healing to bring awareness into the issue and releasing it from all the different parts of our being. (Energy bodies, pathways, chakras, energetic blueprints, physical organs, etc.) Vortex Healing is by far the most powerful and effective approach I have found for this. (In thirty years of exploring a range of approaches.)

These are just some of the approaches I have experience with and have found helpful. What’s common for all of them is that they go beyond just taking and having some understandings, and that’s essential for any real resolution. Whether that resolution is in our relationship to the issue (or what it appears to be about), or a resolution of the issue itself.

And for any of them to be effective, we need to do it with sincerity, receptivity, some doggedness, and with guidance. After a while, we may rely more or mostly on our own guidance, but it’s always good to have the perspective of someone else, especially when it comes to our more ingrained issues.

I should mention that I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for Freud. The essence is sounds and valuable (that much of what’s happening in our mind is outside of conscious awareness, projections, defense mechanisms, etc). And yet, he was a pioneer and a child of his own time and culture, so much of the specifics are perhaps less helpful.

A friend of mine recently told me of a relative who is suicidal (and a psychiatrist) and goes to Freudian psychoanalysis three times a week without it appearing to do much good, or at least not enough good. That was the seed for this article.

tagged: psychology, psychotherapy, resolution, sigmund freud   

Afraid of ones own shadow

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Mickey Mouse in The Haunted House (1929)

In depth psychology, the shadow refers to what we disown in ourselves. Qualities and characteristics in us that we see (more) “out there” in the world and in others than in ourselves, and that we haven’t yet befriended and gotten to know in ourselves. These are usually qualities and characteristics our culture tells us are undesirable, and that don’t fit our desired image of ourselves.

We are scared to admit to them as part of ourselves and our life, often because of fear of how others may see us and judge us, so it’s easier to pretend they exist mostly or only in the wider world and others.

This means we often become afraid of our own (psychological) shadow.

It scares us when we see it in the world because it seems threatening to our well being. We may be afraid of angry people, or immigrants, or people with a certain ideology, or wolves, or aliens, or ghosts, or anything at all. Of course, sometimes it may be appropriate to be afraid of someone or something. And a sign that its a shadow-fear is that it’s consistent, out of proportion to the situation, and often made into an ideology.

And it scares us when someone (which may be our own mind) suggest it’s part of us because it threatens our desired identity. Often, this scares us because we are afraid of how others may see us, judge us, and treat us if we admit to it in ourselves.

Say I am a US businessman with a checkered history. My father gave me almost all my wealth and bailed me out repeatedly when I went bankrupt. My business dealings are often based on deception and semi-illegal activities. So I feel like a fake and a failure, and instead of admitting it (which would be a threat to my desired image of being a successful businessman) I call others failures and fakes. And since I’ll need to keep this up in order to maintain my desired image, this becomes a habit.

Defending and propping up our desired (and very partial) self image is tiring. So eventually, we may realize that it’s easier to just admit to it in ourselves. It’s a relief. It makes us more human and ordinary. It puts us in the same boat as everyone else.

To the mindset that wants to maintain a desired self-image, this can seem threatening. But when we actually do it, we find it is a great relief. We are able to be more real with ourselves and others. We don’t have to be so vigilant when it comes to our self-image. And our views and actions are more fluid and less dictated by the need to maintain our old desired self-image.

As usual, this is an almost infinitely rich topic so I’ll just add a few things.

It is easier to do this among others who do this. It makes us feel more safe. So making a shift to befriending our shadow sometimes does come along with a shift in who we spend our time with.

And there are more structured ways that makes it easier for us to befriend our shadow. There are specific shadow work approaches. Tonglen is great. Most forms of inquiry tends to do it. And for me, the most effective and thorough approach I have found is The Work of Byron Katie.

As we befriend our shadow, it’s no longer a shadow. What seemed scary and threatening no longer is that to us. I suspect that’s why I rarely use the term shadow when I write there. It would make sense to use it since it’s a well-known term but it doesn’t fit my experience so well.

The term shadow makes it sound like something monolithic and one single thing. It’s not monolithic. It’s not a single thing. And it’s not even a thing in the first place. It’s just one thought held as true, which makes my mind see it out there and not in here, and spend some effort trying to maintain that division. And then another thought. It’s something that happens here and now, with the thought that’s here and now.

And the content of that thought varies. Sometimes, it’s about heartless politicians. Sometimes, it’s about idiotic people wanting to shoot all wolves. Sometimes, it’s about a friend who is too angry. Sometimes, it’s about how my mother treats my father. Sometimes, it’s about noisy neighbors.

Since we can project the shadow (any unwanted characteristic) onto anything, we can also put it into the past and future. We can vilify the past, and we can scare ourselves with scary images of the future, whether it’s our own or the world’s.

The image of being afraid of one’s own shadow is a bit comical. And that’s how it is with the psychological shadow as well. We are afraid of something we don’t need to be afraid of. We scare ourselves. It seems real before we investigate it, befriend it, and see it’s literally almost nothing.

In one sense, it’s almost nothing since it’s all created by the mind. In another sense, it’s something since admitting to certain characteristics in ourselves can lead to others judging us and treating us differently. (Especially in more traditional and smaller societies.) And in another sense, it’s something since befriending our shadow allows us to experience ourselves as more whole, more deeply human, more connected to everyone and everything, and it allows us to draw on all of these characteristics in ourselves and make use of them in different situations in life.

How is it all created by the mind? It’s the mind putting labels on the world, others, and ourselves. Deciding these labels are either good or bad, desirable or undesirable. And then making the effort of putting bad labels out there and good ones on ourselves. These labels of good and bad are partially cultural and partially individual. Sometimes, we decide that culturally “bad” labels are good for us. They serve as protection for us. (For instance, being stupid, ugly etc.) So we reverse the usual

These labels of good and bad are partially cultural and partially individual. Sometimes, we decide that culturally “bad” labels are good for us. They serve as protection for us. (For instance, being stupid, ugly etc.) So we reverse the usual good/bad content and tell ourselves “I am stupid, and she is brilliant”. In this case, our own shadow contains characteristics that our culture see as good and desirable. We just don’t think we deserve to see it in ourselves, and we find some sense of safety in it.

Why can it be so difficult to recognize and befriend our shadow? It’s largely because of our culture. It tells us some characteristics are good and some are bad, so we naturally want to see the good ones in ourselves and put the bad ones somewhere else. Our family demonstrates this to us as we grow up, as do friends and society in general. It becomes a habit for us, ingrained almost from birth. So it naturally feels difficult and perhaps scary to befriend our shadow, at least at first, and at least with the characteristics our mind most strongly tells us are bad, undesirable, and scary.

I also assume that in some traditional and smaller societies, it could be risky to openly befriend our shadow. If done with some wisdom, we would just appear as more whole and wise people. But it can also be done in a less balanced, more brash, and less mature and wise fashion, and that could be risky in any culture and society. We’ll get a backlash telling us to wise up.

Our culture does also send messages about befriending our shadow, often through fairy tales, poetry, books, and movies. It tells us humanizing stories about the gifts of befriending our shadow. These are very valuable pointers.

I’ll also say a few words about projections in general. The shadow is one type of projections. And projections are, in one sense, images our mind creates and puts on the world. These types of projections are essential for us being able to navigate and orient in the world.

In another sense, projections are when the mind tells itself that some characteristics are mostly or only in us and not in the wider world, or the other way around, and when these stories are invested with energy (associated with bodily sensations) so they seem more solid, real, and true.

And the shadow are the characteristics our mind tells itself are undesirable, and sees more in the wider world than in itself.

What does it give us to befriend our shadow? When we don’t, we have a unrealistic picture of the world, and we tend to get caught up in (harmful) ideologies and reactivity. It can lead to dehumanizing other people and groups of people, and “demonizing” people or parts of the world. We also make more misinformed and misguided decisions, and we are less able to work around or strengthen our weaknesses. We are, quite literally, prone to be blind-sighted by our blind-spots.

When we befriend our shadow, it gives us a more realistic view on ourselves and the world. We are better able to make good and informed decisions and take care of our own weaknesses (find workarounds, strengthen). It creates a sense of us all being in the same boat. And we are less caught up in reactivity, dehumanizing people, and demonizing parts of the world. We are hopefully a little more able to act from informed clarity and kindness.

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tagged: projections, psychology, shadow, shadow work   

Awakening: small vs big interpretation

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This is something I have found interesting since the initial opening or awakening, and I have written about it a few times before. 

The experience of awakening is, in itself, quite simple. And yet, there are different ways to interpret it.

What do we mean by awakening?  I have found a simple way of talking about it that seems relatively accurate. What we are, which is what any experience happens within and as, wakes up to itself. We can label this consciousness, or love, or Big Mind, or the divine, or many other things, but each of these labels makes it seem that we have pinned it down more than words really are able to. What we are wakes up out of identifications with anything created by words, with any identity.

Thoughts – mental images and words – describe what happens within content of experience. And identities are created by thoughts so also happen within content of experience. They cannot easily point to anything outside of the world of experience. They cannot very easily point to what we are, what awakens to itself. 

Small interpretation. There is a small interpretation of this, and we can also call this the psychological interpretations. I assume this is the interpretation that some within psychology or academia use or will use in the future. We can assume a world much like most people perceive it. There are separate beings. We have a physical world. And the awakening happens because we are, in our own immediate experience and whether we notice it or not, consciousness.

Since we are consciousness, or that’s where the identification “lands” in an awakening, everything appears as consciousness. All of content of experience – all our sense fields including thoughts – happens within and as consciousness. So, to us, the whole world appears as consciousness. It’s a projection. 

Awakening is real, and happens much as it’s described by mystics of all and no traditions. And yet, the world as the mainstream society and academia assumes it is, is just like that. Separate physical beings exist within a physical world, and that’s it. This interpretation makes awakening more palatable to the mainstream society and academia. And the essence of awakening is still as described by mystics from all times and around the world. 

Of course, any thought of the world existing as the mainstream sees it happens within and as what we are. So we just pretend that’s how it is. It’s a strategic choice. A guess. An assumption that makes sense because it makes awakening more understandable to more people. 

Big interpretation. There is also a big interpretation of awakening, and this is the one often found in spiritual traditions. Again, the essence of the awakening is the same as described above. But here, we assume it’s all about the divine. All of existence is the divine, and it wakes up to itself locally and sees through the thoughts of being separate, being a separate being, the world inherently being physical and so on.

In an awakening, the world appears as consciousness and love taking all the forms we see in the world, and that’s exactly how it is. It is all consciousness and love, and we can call it Spirit, Brahman, the divine, or whatever else the different spiritual traditions call it. 

Which one to choose? Which interpretation do we choose? It depends on our situation, background, and inclination. If we want to approach the mainstream world, or work in academia, the small interpretation may make more sense. If we are more free agents or come from a spiritual tradition, the big interpretation may make more sense. 

And there are also some hints that can help us choose. With an awakening, there is often a whole range of side-effects. We may see auras and energies. We may pick up information at a distance. We may experience a great deal of hard-to-dismiss synchronicities. We may sense what will or may happen in the future. All of this, in my view, points to and fits better with the big interpretation of awakening or reality. All happens within and as the divine. Within and as the One. Within and as the nothingness allowing it all. 

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tagged: awakening, essential topic, psychology, small and big interpretation of awakening, spirituality, talking about, who and what we are   

Awakening from a psychological perspective

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From a conventional view, there is this human being and consciousness is somehow connected with it.

And logically, since it’s the consciousness experiencing we must experience ourselves as this consciousness. Whether we notice or not, we are consciousness.

The next logical step is that we can notice ourselves as this consciousness, and any and all content of experience as happening within and as this consciousness. And that’s awakening. 

It’s really super simple. Almost banal. It certainly doesn’t have to be very esoteric. And yet, I realize it can seem a bit mysterious since that’s often how it has been presented in the past, and if we don’t have a direct experience or taste of it ourselves it can seem a bit abstract.

But in reality, it’s very simple. It’s already our experience, whether we notice it or not. And there are simple ways for us to have an immediate taste of it. 

The essence of what the mystics and spiritual traditions have talked about is also true. It takes time to clarify this and make it our new conscious home. It takes time to get all the different parts of ourselves on board with it. It takes time to learn to live from it more consistently and in more and more situations in life.

And any and all of the different practices from different spiritual traditions can help us with this, whether it’s natural rest, training a more stable focus, prayer, heart-centered practices, inquiry, body-centered practices, a life of service, and so on. 

This is the psychological perspective on awakening. We can still imagine there is a physical body and world, and that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we notice that all of it – all of our current experience of this human self, others, and the world – happens within and as what we are. It happens within and as what we may call consciousness. In our immediate experience, all is one since all happens within and as what we are. 

The difference with the spiritual perspective is that here, we go a step further. We acknowledge all of this, but we may say that the world really is consciousness, and we may call it the divine, or God, or Spirit, or Brahman, or Big Mind. 

And if you are like me, then you’ll find both of those perspectives valid and useful. Which one we use just depends on what seems most helpful for ourselves or others in the situation. 

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tagged: awakening, essential topic, psychology, talking about, who and what we are   

Psychological and spiritual interpretations of awakening

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This is something I have been curious about since the initial spiritual awakening: an awakening can be interpreted in a psychological or a spiritual way, and most of the data fit either explanation. Which one we chose depends on our inclination, which one seems most helpful to ourselves, and perhaps which one seems more helpful for the reciver if we point to it for someone else’s benefit.

In short, an awakening is typically experienced as a realization that all is awakeness or consciousness. Any apparently separate beings are expressions of this awakeness. They are local and temporary expressions of awakeness or consciousness, as is everything else including what appears as the physical world.

This can be interpreted in a psychological way. This awakeness or consciousness is connected to this human being, and since we are this awakeness we can awaken to ourselves as this awakeness. We – as observer, experiencer, doer, human self – and the world as it appears to us happens within and as this awakeness. This is an explanation that actually would fit within conventional psychology, although not that many talks about it this way. (Yet… I imagine more will in the future.)

This allows us to operate with our immediate experience on the one hand, where everything happens within and as awakeness, and the conventional world on the other hand, that exists and functions as before. Of course, in our immediate experience all of this, including this framework or map, happens within and as awakeness, as everything else does.

It can also be interpreted in a conventional spiritual way. The whole world is the divine, and it temporarily and locally takes itself to be a separate being, and then awakens to itself as awakeness and everything happening within and as this awakeness.

Both the psychological and spiritual interpretations fit most of the data. In the first case, we – naturally – project the awakeness onto the whole world. In the second, everything – the whole world – is this awakeness and awakens to itself as all of it.

So which one do we chose? It depends on our culture, background, and inclination. And it also depends on what is most helpful to ourselves and others. If we talk about this in a conventional psychology setting, we may choose the psychological approach. If we talk about it in a spiritual context, the spiritual interpretation makes more sense.

In either case, it’s good to be aware of these two ways of interpreting awakening, hold both lightly, and see that we can choose to use one or the other depending on what seems most helpful in the setting we are in.

I said that most data fits either interpretation, which means some data fits one better than the other. To me, what’s revealed through parapsychological research – ESP, near-death experiences, reincarnation cases and so on – fits the spiritual interpretation better. As does my own personal experiences of ESP, seeing energies and auras, distance healing, and more.

I also said, “This awakeness or consciousness is connected to this human being”. I use the word “connected” intentionally since it leaves room for both a materialistic interpretation (the mind arises from the brain) and the reverse (the mind and consciousness as primary and using the brain as radio waves uses a radio).

Why is most mainstream psychology is not yet on board with the psychological interpretation? Partly because they are not so interested in awakening, and may assume it’s just a fanciful idea and not something pragmatic and close at hand. Partly because they may not realize or have taken in that we, in our own experience, are awakeness or consciousness, and that all content of experience happens within and as this awakeness. It can’t be any other way. When this awakeness wakes up to itself, and to all its experiences as happening within and as itself, that’s what we call awakening. It’s close at hand and not very mystical or fanciful.

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tagged: essential topic, psychology, small and big interpretation of awakening, spirituality, talking about, who and what we are   

The upside of feeling a bit grumpy: getting things done

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I regularly notice the upside of being a bit grumpy.

It helps me get things done. It helps me overcome inertia so I can do tasks I, on other days, may put off due to some resistance.

This is an example of helpful daily-life strategies. I notice I am a bit grumpy, and I intentionally use that grumpiness and the energy behind it to get things done I have earlier put off.

In the longer run, it’s also good to explore what’s behind the resistance and resolve it. It may be (unexplored) fear and discomfort, and behind that stressful beliefs and identifications, and behind that early life experiences creating wounds, stressful beliefs, and perhaps (mostly low grade) trauma.

Going back to the initial strategy, there is now some research on grumpiness and pushing through resistance. It’s an example of research where – I assume – the researcher had a hunch, followed up on it through research, and had it confirmed. The hunch may have been from noticing something in their own life, or being told about it, or reading about it in fiction literature. And, of course, the research may later be interpreted in different ways, or later research may find something else. That’s always a possibility.

It’s also an example of research that may seem a bit obvious. Since psychology as a scientific discipline is still in its infancy, a lot of the research will seem a bit obvious. It needs to be to create a foundation to build on. And, sometimes, they do find things that initially may seem counterintuitive.

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tagged: psychology, research, strategies   

Are hell, heaven and purgatory real?

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Another revisited topic:

Are hell, heaven, and purgatory real?

Yes, we can definitely say they are…. if we see them as reflecting states and process of the mind.

Hell reflects a hellish state of mind. The mind experiences something and tells itself it’s hell. It may be caught in beliefs about a situation, state, or emotion. And it gets caught in blind reactivity to it which is experienced as hellish and may look like getting caught in anger, despair, grief, vengefulness, justification, self-pity, and much more.

Heaven can reflect two different things. One is similar to hell. The mind experiences a pleasant state and tells itself it’s good, it’s so good it’s heaven. It’s heavenly. Another is when the mind is able to notice and allow what’s here, whatever it is. It’s a certain equanimity or contentment, independent of the particular content of experience.

Purgatory is any time an unloved or unquestioned part of ourselves is met in a way that allows for healing. It can happen through noticing and allowing it as is. Or, for instance, inquiring into it. It may be uncomfortable. It can feel like torment. It can feel overwhelming. And yet, because of how it’s met – with some noticing, allowing, respect, and patience – it’s ultimately healing. It’s purifying and can bring us to heaven.

So if someone asks me if I believe in heaven, hell, or purgatory, I’ll say yes. But it’s a heaven, hell, and purgatory that’s right here and we can explore for ourselves right now. We don’t need to wait until we die.

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tagged: healing, heaven, hell, projections, psychology, purgatory   

Inquiry, TRE, Vortex Healing etc. vs talk therapy

moe Leave a comment

Talk therapy can be helpful in some situations, depending on the client, issue, therapist, and timing. In the best case, it can give us some sense of being seen and understood. That what we experience is normal. And it can give us some helpful insights and pointers.

For me, I generally find other approaches far more helpful.

In my case, it’s the ones I tend to write about here: Ho’oponopno to change my relationship to myself, others, a situation, or the world. Tonglen for the same. Inquiry for releasing beliefs (The Work) or charges out of an issue (Living Inquiries). Therapeutic trembling to release tension and trauma out of the body, and even out of specific issues (TRE). Vortex Healing for a current situation, emotional issues or identifications, and even for physical issues. All supported by training a more stable attention (samatha), and also noticing and allowing what’s here (Natural Rest, Shikantaza).

And for me, all of that supported by nature. A relatively healthy diet. Some physical activity. Nurturing of nurturing relationships and activities. And whatever else seems helpful.

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tagged: heart-centered practice, ho'oponopono, inquiry, living inquiries / kiloby inquiries, natural rest, psychology, shikantaza, stable attention, talk therapy, tension and trauma release exercises, the work of byron katie, tonglen, vortex healing   

Awakening, and then projections of this awakening

moe Leave a comment

Again a revisited topic:

When awakening happens here, it tends to be projected out.

We see it everywhere. The whole universe seems awake. We see it in other beings, and that it just needs to be more consciously noticed there for a more full awakening to take place.

Projections typically happen in two ways. One is when we legitimately recognize what’s here also out there. In ordinary human interactions, it’s called empathy or understanding. I sometimes get angry, so I recognize when others get angry. The other is when I put my own things on others. I am angry at someone, so I imagine the look she gave me means she is angry at me even if that may not be the case at all.

Which one is it in the case of awakening? It could be either one, although there are hints here and there suggesting the first one – at least in its basic version where the universe is perceived as awakeness and consciousness. Some of these hints are: Synchronicities (in my life, they happen in clusters, in some periods they happen at a ridiculous rate and other times less so). Download of information after an awakening. Seeing auras (which can be checked and confirmed or not with others who also see them, as I did after the awakening). Sensing at a distance (can also be checked with others and reality).

So, yes, we perceive the universe as awakeness and consciousness, and awake to itself. That’s because this awakeness is recognized here. And some clues suggest it may be an accurate perception.

Another version of this, which seems more typical for our modern interconnected age, is a perception that larger parts of humanity are about to wake up or is waking up. This too is a projection, but is it also accurate? I am not so sure about that. It’s easy to get that impression through internet where we can find a good deal of people where awakening is or have taken place. The same is the case if we live on, for instance, the US west coast where the culture (a large subculture) tends to support awakening. Also, more people may be waking up because information and support for inviting in awakening are more readily available. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually taken place.

Note: When we say that existence or the universe is awakeness or consciousness, or even that it’s awake to itself, that doesn’t mean this is consciously recognized in all beings. In most beings, it’s not consciously recognized. And that’s part of lila, the play of the divine. We could say that Spirit has gone to great lenghts to make it so small parts of itself is in the darkness in this sense.

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tagged: awakening, projections, psychology   

Victim and victimizer

moe Leave a comment

I am briefly revisiting this topic:

When we explore identities, it’s helpful to explore both ends of the polarity.

For instance, if we have chronic and bothersome issues in our lives, we may also have a victim identity connected with it. It’s helpful to explore this identity and perhaps find healing for it. At the same time, we have a victimizer part in us. We couldn’t have a victim part without the victimizer part. They depend on each other to exist, and they hold each other in place. If we only address the victim part, we only do half (or less) of the work and the release will be partial.

An example from my own life is the victim identity connected with the chronic fatigue (CFS). Yes, there is a victim identity and it’s helpful to inquire into it and invite healing and release for it (through inquiry, TRE, Vortex Healing etc.). But that’s less than half the picture. The rest is the internal victimizer that creates and holds the victim-identity in place. This one may be more difficult to notice since we tend to see it mostly “out there” in life, circumstances, or others. But it’s equally, or really, in here, in me. And that’s where I need to explore it if I wish to find more freedom around the whole victim-victimizer dynamic.

The freedom and relief that comes from this work makes it worth it in itself. And, who knows, it may even impact my physical health. The release may support my body in healing itself better. So it’s definitely worth the time and investment required to find some healing around this and many other identity-sets.

Note: When I have worked on my own internal victimizer using Vortex Healing, I have found it helpful to approach it from slightly different angles. For instance, intending to work on the victimizer, the bully, the self-cruelty, and more, one at a time.

Also, when I say that working on just one of the pair of parts or subpersonalities, it’s because there is the other half, and there is also the awareness and exploration of the dynamic within the pair. So if we work on just one of a pair, it’s less than half of what we need to explore to find a fuller release.

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tagged: chronic fatigue, polarities, psychology, subpersonalities, victim, victimizer   

Change behavior? Change the situation

moe Leave a comment

I was at a social gathering yesterday where the topic of burnout came up, and a therapist talked about the importance of mindfulness and staying focused and so on.

I understand it’s tempting to look to individual changes for solutions. It’s part of our culture: we tend to see individuals as autonomous units rather than as seamless parts of a larger whole. We are trained to look to changes in the individual for solutions. And individual changes can sometimes seem more controllable than the situation.

Although in my experience, if I want to change a behavior or avoid something like burnout, it’s often more effective to change the situation. We exist within social and physical settings, and these significantly influence how we are, perhaps more than we often are aware of.

It’s not an either-or situation, but, if possible, changing the environment is a good start.

Some examples:

Struggling with procrastination? Get a work-buddy that you can work side-by-side with and who can hold you accountable. Or work at a cafe. Or hire a personal assistant if that’s something that works for the task. Try out different approaches and find the one(s) that work for you.

Over-eating unhealthy foods? Remove processed foods and sugars from the house. Shop from a shopping list and don’t add more to it when you are in the store. Make delicious low-on-the-food-chain meals ahead of time so they are readily available. Have plenty of tasty fruits, vegetables, and nuts on hand. Make sure you feel satisfied and nourished before you leave the house so you are less tempted to have fast food. And so on.

Want to prevent burnout? The solutions here depend on the work and personal situations. For instance, my doctor in Norway cut his patient list in half last year so he could have more time with each patient, enjoy his work more, and prevent burnout. My doctor in Oregon switched from working for a hospital to private practice, and similarly intentionally have a small patient list. At a personal level, it can help to limit activities, pay for assistance with practical things, and so on. And at a larger level, it has to do with business, political, and social norms, expectations, values, and policies. (Perhaps not so easy for us as individuals to change, but good to be aware of and perhaps be a small part of the solution for.)

And in some areas, we already know and make use of the importance of the environment. For instance, want to learn something? Join a training program or school for just that. Want awakening? Traditionally, we would become a nun or monk, and now we may join the regular practice program of a local spiritual community or do retreats or workshops. I don’t always agree with the way this is done, but these are areas where we traditionally use the change-the-situation-first approach.

With a client (or myself as a client), I tend to focus first on changing the situation, especially the low-hanging fruits, the things it’s relatively easy to change that has the most impact. And then on what in us prevents behavior change, for instance, what are the emotional issues? (And address those through inquiry, TRE, Vortex Healing, or something else.)

Note: I know that the therapist probably knows this too, and most likely includes this in his sessions with clients. I was just struck by how he immediately went to individual-focused solutions.

tagged: psychology   

Mapping experience: type, strength & frequency, engagement

moe Leave a comment

How do we map our day-to-day experience?

It depends on the purpose. But a good starting point may be to include these facets.

The type of experience. Sad, happy, angry, content, elated etc.

The strength of the experience. Is it strong or weak? Overwhelming or barely noticeable?

The frequency of that particular experience. Daily. Every few days. Every hour. Every few years. Never. Once?

The level of engagement. How engaged are we with it? Do we engage and struggle with it and spin it into a number of other stories and emotions? Is it easy to see that it’s just passing and visiting, and allow it as is?

Type, strength, and frequency can be helpful to pinpoint emotional issues to find healing for. And the level of engagement shows us how wrapped up in it we tend to be. If it’s just something that’s passing, it doesn’t really bother or impact us much. But engagement with it may influence our experience and life quite a bit.

In everyday life, there may be faint sadness from reading a story in the news. It’s allowed, passing, and not engaged with. In a conventional depression, there may be frequent and strong sadness that’s strongly identified with. And in a healing or awakening process, there may be strong emotions and thoughts but they are allowed, welcomed, and not engaged with much. They are recognized as living their own life and passing.

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tagged: emotions, psychology, questionnaires, who and what we are   

Awakening and mainstream psychology

moe Leave a comment

Is awakening and mainstream psychology compatible?

I would say yes. At least if we understand awakening in a pragmatic way, use a simple language, and frame awakening so it makes sense from a psychological view. And if there is some generosity and willingness from the psychological world.

Here is an example of how we can talk about it:

(a) Our perception is always of all as consciousness. We don’t perceive objects, people, or the world. We perceive sensory input and imaginations mimicking sensory input, and all that happens within and as consciousness.

Apart from being logical, we can also explore it in immediate experience and find it for ourselves. If something appears real and solid, it’s because mind tells itself this experience is the real world. In reality, it’s a combination of sense experiences and imaginations of these sense experiences.

(b) So awakening is just a shift of our center of gravity, what we take ourselves to be, from content of experience to that which experience happens within and as. It’s a shift from ideas of being a human to the awakeness or consciousness it all happens within and as. Instead of taking ourselves to be content of experience, we find ourselves as context.

I say “just a shift” because it’s simple in theory. It’s easy to grasp as an idea. But the actual shift can take a good amount of work. We may have glimpses and short periods of experiencing this shift, but a more stable and thorough shift typically takes work (and, mostly, grace).

The idea that awakening and mainstream psychology are incompatible comes partly from weird and “mystical” ideas of awakening, and partly from psychology wanting to stay sober and down to earth. Of course, there is already a good deal of interest and research on mindfulness in psychology. And I suspect one of the next steps will be a genuine interest in, and research on, awakening. Using a simple, pragmatic, and sober language when we talk about awakening will support that step.

What may research on awakening look like? Here are some possibilities:

How people who claim a stable and clear awakening function in life? What are the typical characteristics? How do they perceive and operate? What are the brain and other physical characteristics?

The difference between the awakening itself and how it’s lived and embodied. How much of the person is on board or aligned with the awakening. How to support that embodiment.

What’s the process to awakening? What are the paths? What works for whom? What’s the most effective approaches for people in specific situations (personality, inclinations etc.)?

What are the pitfalls on the path? What can go wrong? When is it more likely to go wrong? When is it less likely? What can we do to prevent it? What can we do when something does go wrong? What are the approaches that work best for the different scenarios?

My guess is that we’ll see this type of academic focus and interest more and more in the coming decades.

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tagged: awakening, psychology, research   

Shared secrets out in the open

moe Leave a comment

Shared secrets of this kind is the norm for certain issues, and I assume one reason most people don’t speak about it because others don’t speak about it. Also, many don’t like to have their inconsistencies pointed out and in the open because it means they (or we) would have to do something about it.

The quote is from a previous post.

I think there are a great number of shared secrets in our culture. We know but don’t speak about it because it would rock the boat. We know but, for whatever reason, don’t want to know so we don’t speak about it. Or we would know if we paid attention to it, but since we haven’t yet we don’t have anything to say about it.

If we know but don’t speak about it, it may be for several different reasons. Others don’t so we would go against norms and taboos. We may not want to hurt someone’s feelings. It would put the spotlight on us and make us vulnerable to uncomfortable attention. We may be expected to do something about it.

Here are a few examples of these types of shared secrets:

We accept certain ingroup behavior more readily than similar outgroup behavior.

We give reasons that are not the real reasons for our behavior. (To appear better to ourselves and others, to not hurt ourselves and others.)

We pretend we know when we don’t know. (And that we can’t know anything for sure.)

News in the media is not so much about news as entertainment. They sell a product. It’s not about shedding light on the really important issues in our society and culture. (There are some exceptions, such as The Guardian.)

We pretend it’s ethical to imprison other beings, use them as slaves, eat them etc. We justify doing medical research on them bc they are similar to us while justifying enslaving and eating them because they are different from us.

We pretend it’s ethical or OK (or wise) to not take the interests of future generations, nonhuman beings, ecosystems etc. into consideration in our policies and decisions

Some accept a religion just because they are born into it. Not because it makes more sense than anything else. They do it for social reasons.

Some go into a religion for emotional comfort.

And things I noticed later….

International and national policies are often aimed at lining the pockets of the wealthy.

We pretend that an economic system and ideology (in our time, neoliberalism) aimed at benefiting the wealthy is in the interest of everyone.

None of these are necessarily bad or wrong, but it’s better to be open about it. To admit to ourselves and others what we already know and see the inconsistencies in it. That’s when change can happen.

Is it true we pretend? Yes and no. In many cases, we may know but not know that we know. We need to be reminded or have it pointed out, sometimes by life itself. And I am also very aware that these reflect my own experience of the world and may seem different to others.  Read More

tagged: open secrets, politics, psychology, society   

Are religious people delusional?

moe Leave a comment

Are religious people delusional? That’s a question addressed by a recent article in The Guardian.

It’s a complex question and, as usual, it depends. Here are a few angles.

In general, what’s common and shared in a culture is not seen as unusual or a problem. (Although people from another background and culture may well see it differently.) Common religious beliefs and behaviors won’t be seen as delusional, even by people who disagree or have another view. And since most human cultures accept religions, we tend to give religions and religious people more leeway than we do in other cases.

If religious views or behaviors seem too much out of the ordinary we are more likely to wonder what’s going on. The views may be stronger than usual. Their views or behavior may be out of the ordinary. Their identity may be seen as unusual. And that may be considered a disorder or delusional.

Mystical experience is a subset of what I just mentioned. Some religious traditions and cultures accept mystical experiences (Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism), and some see it as more unusual  (Protestant Christianity). In the latter, mystical experiences may be viewed with more suspicion although it depends on how the person interpret their own experiences.

In general, from a mainstream psychological view, it depends on how the person views their own beliefs and experiences. If they have a reasonably rational and mature relationship to it, and their interpretations are not too much out of the ordinary, they are likely to be seen as sane. If they seem to have unusually strong beliefs, or very unusual interpretations, they are more likely to be seen as delusional.

I understand this approach. As social and group creatures, we absorb the views and norms of our culture. And whatever is ordinary is also normal and generally seen as sane. And yet, it’s possible to take a more dispassionate view. We can take a step back and imagine we see it from the outside.

From a more dispassionate view, I would say religious beliefs are delusional. If we adopt views and beliefs (a) unsupported by our own experience and solid data, (b) just because someone else holds them, that is – in a strict sense – delusional. It may be understandable and ordinary but also delusional. It makes about as much sense as believing in Santa Claus.

So why don’t psychologists see religious beliefs as delusional? There are many reasons. Mainly, the beliefs are understandable and ordinary and they want to give people some leeway. Also, they don’t want to antagonize large groups of people. And if religious beliefs are seen as delusional, then any belief will have to be seen as delusional.

And, of course, that’s actually true. When we hold our own imagination – which our thoughts are – as representing reality in any final or absolute sense, then we are delusional. Any belief is, in a strict sense, delusional. That’s why it’s also stressful. It’s out of alignment with reality.

Fortunately, there is a way out. And that way may include many forms of explorations including various forms of meditation, heart-centered practices, body-inclusive practices, and inquiry.

Perhaps in the future or in some society somewhere else in the universe, the norm is to take thoughts for what they are. As imagination only helpful in a practical sense to help us orient and navigate in the world. And not as a pointer to any final or absolute truth or reality. In such a society, religious belief – as any other belief – may be seen as delusional. Understandable but delusional.

Just to make it clear: I am talking about religious belief here. Not necessarily spirituality. Spirituality – as anything else – can and does get mixed in with beliefs. But it can also be a more open and pragmatic exploration. It can be a reporting on direct experiences, in an as honest way as possible. It can be a practical exploration through using pointers and practices to see what we find. It can be an exploration of reality, just as (other forms of) science. And that can be done outside of or (sometimes) within a religious context.

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tagged: inquiry, psychology, religion, society   

The problem with (some) psychological questionnaires

moe Leave a comment

Many psychological measures and questionnaires are well designed and thought out. But some are not. Their questions can be interpreted in different ways which leaves the answers open for misinterpretation. Or they don’t measure everything needed to give a good picture of the situation.

For instance, here are my answers to two different measures of depression. A short one (MASDR) where the questions are reasonably well phrased. And another (CES-D) where they ask about the frequency of specific types of experience, but not the intensity. This provides insufficient data for any useful interpretation, and – again – leaves the answers open to misinterpretation.

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tagged: psychology, questionnaires   

Thoughts, charge, identification

moe Leave a comment

Finding clarity often has to do with differentiation. And here is a very basic one.

There is a difference between thoughts, bodily sensations, and identifications.

Thoughts are mental imitations of the senses – whether they are images, sounds, taste, smell, movement, sensations, or something else. When we talk about thoughts, we usually mean images and words, and words are typically a combination of mental images (of the words) and sounds.

Sensations are bodily sensations. When the mind associates certain thoughts with certain sensations, the sensations tend to lend a sense of charge (reality, substance, solidity) to the thoughts, and the thoughts lend a sense of meaning to the sensations.

When there is identifications with a thought, it seems true. The mind identifies with the viewpoint of the thought. Thoughts that are not identified with pass through and are recognized as just thoughts. They are seen as questions about the world. Temporary guides for orientation and action in the world, at most. It’s clear that they don’t reflect any final or absolute truth. Thoughts that are identified with tend to seem true and real. And the mechanism for identification with thoughts is for the mind to associate sensations with thoughts, as described above.

When it comes to tools for exploring these, they each seem to work on certain aspects of this thought, charge, and identification dynamic. They each use a slightly different angle to invite a release of the charge out of the thoughts, and soften the identification with these.

For instance, Living Inquiries tend to release the association between thoughts and sensations. Thoughts are then more easily recognized as thoughts, and the previous associated sensations may still be there but now with less or no particular meaning. The Work helps us recognize that previously believed thoughts are not inherently or absolutely true, and that other angles are as or more valid. Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) tends to release the charge from the body which is associated with stressful thoughts and trauma, and the thoughts behind the stress and trauma tends to seem less charged and less true, and there may be less identification with them. Vortex Healing seems to work from both the bodily charge and consciousness side of this dynamic.

A footnote about mainstream psychology: I have for a long time noticed that mainstream psychologists sometimes don’t differentiate between these. For instance, many psychological questionnaires ask about thoughts but not how much charge they hold, or how identified the person is with these. And that’s one of many ways questionnaires can be interpreted in a misleading way.

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tagged: beliefs, identification, inquiry, psychology, questionnaires, thoughts   

Spiritual openings as an antidote to depression

moe Leave a comment

It’s well known that certain psychedelics, like magic mushrooms and LSD, can be used to treat depression.

For some, it seems to work through giving the user a form of spiritual opening, a taste of oneness. And that, in turn, gives them a new context for life and everything, and a deeper sense of meaning and belonging. They see themselves and their relationship to the rest of life differently.

For me, this has happened spontaneously. And I do notice that depressions don’t seem to stick or take much hold. There can be a range of emotions, including despair and emotional pain, but depression doesn’t seem to make so much sense in the context of all as the divine. And that’s what I hear from others as well, including people going through a dark night of the soul. (Although I am sure there are exceptions.)

I have never used any psychedelics and don’t feel drawn to trying any. But I do know that if used appropriately, in the right setting and with the right guidance, it seems to help some people. I still wouldn’t recommend it if anyone asked since things can go a bit weird, and there are alternatives. There are alternatives for dealing with depression. And there are alternatives to having a taste of oneness. Read More

tagged: psychedelics, psychology   

Dark Night in Psychological vs Spiritual Context

moe Leave a comment

The term dark night, or dark night of the soul, can be used in a psychological or spiritual context.

In a psychological context, it’s often used about anything psychologically shattering – trauma, loss, burnout or similar.

In a spiritual context, a dark night of the soul it’s what typically comes after an initial opening or awakening, and a period of “illumination” (as Evelyn Underhill calls it). It can take the form of a loss of conscious connection with the divine, a great deal of unprocessed psychological material surfacing, loss of health and other losses in life, and more. It’s a humbling and very human process, and the “darkness” comes largely from our reaction to it. Our minds don’t like it and perceive it as dark, even if it is the next natural step in our maturation and development.

They are quite similar. In both cases, we may have a great deal of unprocessed psychological material surfacing with an invitation to find kindness, understanding, and healing for it. We come up against our beliefs and identifications with certain identities and are invited to examine them and allow the hold on them to soften. In both cases, it’s an opportunity for great healing, maturing, humanizing, and reorientation.

In the bigger picture, both can be seen as a spiritual process. An invitation for healing, maturing, and even awakening out of our old beliefs and identifications.

There is also a difference, and that’s the conscious context of the one going through it. In a spiritual dark night of the soul, there is already a knowing of all as Spirit – even what’s happening in this part of the process. And that makes a great deal of difference. That helps us go through it, even if it’s just a background knowing.

What helps us move through a dark night, whether the context is psychological or spiritual?

Here are some possibilities: Taking care of ourselves. Understanding people around us. Therapy – body-oriented, mind-oriented, or both. Nature. Food that’s nourishing. Time. A willingness to face what’s coming up and move through it. Inquiry (The Work, Living Inquiries etc.). Heart-centered practices (Tonglen, Ho’oponopono, loving kindness etc.) Body-inclusive practices (yoga, tai chi, chigong, Breema etc.)

For me, support of someone who understands the process, finding helpful tools and approaches, and the willingness to face what’s here and move through it, have been especially helpful.

What tools and approaches have worked for me? The ones mentioned above, and more recently Vortex Healing.

Note: In a spiritual context, there are several dark nights of the soul. I simplified it here and just mentioned the dark night of the soul. The essence of having to face beliefs and identifications is the same for all of them, at least the ones I am aware of so far.

Note: In any dark night, and any life experience, our distress is created by how we relate to and perceive what’s happening. That’s why inquiry can be very helpful. There is an invitation there to find more clarity and consciously align more closely with reality.

The photo is one I took at the edge of Princetown on Dartmoor some years back.

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tagged: dark night, healing, maturing, own photography, psychology, spirituality, unprocessed psychological material   

Mindfulness to deal with burnout?

moe Leave a comment

I usually don’t write about mainstream psychology here since it’s covered well many other places. But the topic of burnout has been on my mind lately as I have helped with a thesis on the topic and it illustrates a more general point.

In the mindfulness world, mindfulness is sometimes promoted as an antidote to burnout. And that’s true enough. It can certainly help individuals to be more resilient and reduce the chances of burnout.

At the same time, mindfulness is an individual solution to a more systemic problem. In most cases of workplace burnout, the problems lies with the structures and the system. It has to do with how the business is organized and operated. It has to do with the owner and management.

And beyond that, it has to do with how we have organized ourselves collectively. It has to do with our current social and economic system, and especially the very obvious downsides to neoliberalism.

Beyond that again, it has to do with our most basic worldview. We currently have a worldview that separates humans from nature, values the material over the immaterial, the human over rest of life, and too often values profit over people.

As individuals we function in a larger social and ecological system, and that’s where most of the causes and solutions to burnout – and a range of other apparently individual problems – lie.

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tagged: burnout, mindfulness, politics, psychology   

Healing & awakening = aligning with reality 

moe Leave a comment

Healing and awakening is all about aligning with reality – at all levels of our being.

That’s a tall order. And it’s already what’s here.

In brief:

We are a local part and expression of life. We are already reality so from this perspective, no alignment needs to happen. We can’t align with what we already are.

And yet, as human beings, we are typically out of alignment in many ways. There is room for alignment and this alignment is an ongoing process of exploration and inquiry, healing and maturing as human beings, and embodying our discoveries and realizations.

How did we get out of alignment? We got out of alignment by holding our thoughts as solid, real, and true. We aligned with our thoughts more than being receptive to life as it is. We came to identify and experiencing ourselves as a being separate from the rest of existence. (Consiousness identified in that way, and took itself to be a being within the content of itself.) And this process built on itself so we came to create wounds, trauma, dynamics leading to some physical illnesses, relationship problems, and a culture and society out of tune with the larger living world.

Nothing is wrong. It’s all life expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself. And yet, it is uncomfortable so at some point, there is a motivation to coming back into alignment with life so we can find a sense of home, being in tune with reality, and being more at ease.

How do we get back into alignment? We do so by noticing what we are. That we already are (this local expression of) life and a whole that always is whole. We do so by healing and maturing as human beings. We do so by an ongoing process of clarifying and embodying.

That’s the short version.

And in more detail:

Already reality. We are, in a sense, already 100% aligned with reality. We are life, this local part of the Universe, all of us is already Spirit. We cannot help being 100% reality. We are more than aligned with reality, we are reality. We are this local thinking, feeling, experiencing part of reality. As what we are, we are already reality.

Room for realignment. And it’s a tall order. It’s an ongoing process. We’ll need to face a great deal that may be uncomfortable to us, mainly because we have habitually pushed it away and seen as scary. As who we are, this human being, there is a lot of room for realignment.

Out of alignment. How did we get out of alignment?

One answer is that we, as human beings, tend to believe our thoughts. We hold some of our thoughts as real and true representations of reality and perceive and live as if that’s the case. That inherently creates a sense of separation and of being a separate being, and temporarily veils what we already are. (Life experiencing itself through this local body and these local thoughts, feelings, and experiences.) This – combined with meeting difficult life situations – is also what creates contractions, wounds, and trauma, and the accumulated effects of different types of contractions.

Another answer is Lila, the play of the divine. It seems that Existence has an inherent drive to experience itself in always new ways. The universe is life expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself in always new ways. And one aspect of that is creating beings and energetic/consciousness veils that create a temporary and local experience of separation. Nothing went wrong. There are no lessons to be learned, no redemption to be earned. It’s just the temporary play of the divine.

Into alignment. So how do we get back into alignment?

We get back into alignment by noticing that we already are life and whole as we are. We already are a wholeness that’s always whole. We can understand that in different ways, and the easiest may be to notice that all happens within and as awakeness or consciousness. And that’s always whole and undivided.

We also get back into alignment through healing and maturing as human beings. And by consciously living from whatever realizations we have about life, what we are, and who we are (aka embodiment).

Both of these are ongoing explorations. As what we are, we keep noticing and clarifying. As who we are, we keep healing, maturing, and embodying. And it’s not at all a linear path.

A few additional notes:

Christianity. I thought I would say a few words about Christianity. In some cultures, the idea of aligning with reality for healing and awakening is natural and comes in from birth. I assume Buddhist cultures, Taoist cultures, and many native cultures are this way.

In other cultures, and specifically Christian and perhaps Abrahamic or theistic cultures in general, it’s different. Here, nature, life, and reality is viewed with some ambivalence and perhaps suspicion.

In Christinanity, there is the idea of original sin which makes us question our own nature, we are suspicious of our natural drives (sex, eating, resting etc.). We may also be trained to be suspicious of nature and life since it can lead us into temptation. In a Christian culture, or one that was Christian for a long time, it can seem odd or questionable to want to align with reality. If we and nature is more or less inherently sinful, why would we align with it?

Maybe it’s better to push it away as much as we can? Or maybe it’s better to transcend? We may try transcending, and find it works for a while, but reality is whole so we are inevitably brought back here and now with what’s already here.

In this case, it’s good to take small steps. Try it out and see what happens. We can explore this through inquiry where we question stressful thougths and find what’s more true for us. We can also explore it through body-centered practices such as Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises where we use the natural and inherent mechanisms of the body to find healing. Through these explorations, we may see that aligning with nature and reality is healing and can give us a sense of coming home.  We gradually build trust.

Healing, awakening, & sustainability. As shines through what I wrote above, healing, awakening and sustainability are all about aligning with reality. That’s why the three – for me – are inseperable. The seeds of dis-ease, an unawakened experience, and a society out of tune with the larger living world, are all the same. And the basic remedy is the same as well – align with life and reality.

For healing, we can align through inquiry, TRE, Breema, yoga, meditation and more. For awakening, we can align through inquiry, meditation, prayer, and more (whatever helps us ripen). For sustainability, we can align with life through philosophical and economic frameworks that takes ecological realities into account (which none of the current mainstream ones do), and a generally worldview that does the same.

Psychotherapy. I intentionally left out psychotherapy from my (brief) list of ways we can find healing. That’s because psychotherapy can be healing or not depending on who’s doing it (the therapist) and the approach they are using. If the therapist’s view is inherently skeptical about life and reality, then any healing won’t go very deep. It may even be traumatizing. If their view and life is more deeply aligned with life and reality, and they have a deep trust in life, then the healing can go quite deep. Process Work is an excellent example of an approach that’s inherently trusting of and aligned with life.

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tagged: alignment, awakening, christianity, healing, inquiry, life, process work, psychology, psychotherapy, realign, reality, therapy, who and what we are   

Making use of how people already are

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Human behavior is often irrational. We tend to focus on what’s immediate, dramatic, and emotional. We are drawn to what’s shocking and unusual rather than long-term trends. We are more interested in this morning’s dramatic death than the thousands dying of hunger each day. We are more interested in what Trump tweeted at 5am than increasing social inequality.

The media knows that and plays into it by making news into entertainment and drama. That’s how they get viewers and readers. That’s how they maximize profit. They too act in their short-term interest.

And all of it is from evolution. For our ancestors, it was important to pay attention to anything that stood out and anything dramatic, and they rarely needed to pay attention to the big picture or slow trends. It’s how we, as a species, survived.

In a democracy, we need to get people to pay more attention to the serious and slower trends, and less on shorter term drama and entertainment. And we can do just that by taking evolution and how people really function into account, instead of wishful thinking about how people “should” function.

If we have sufficiently informed political and business leaders, we can set up structures so that what’s easy and attractive is also good in the long term and in the big picture.

And we can speak to people in general in ways that work with the mechanisms put into us by evolution: Tell compelling stories. Make it simple, immediate, and personal. Show how it aligns with the values and identities they already have. Make it genuinely attractive.

There are two more facets to this. Some of us seem wired to look more at the big picture and think about things in a more dispassionate way. That too makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. As a species and community, we generally need many who are drawn to the immediate and a few drawn to the bigger picture.

And there is another reason why many tend to avoid thinking about the big picture: they feel they are unable to do anything about it. So we can add one more element to how to work with how people already function: Show that their actions do make a real difference. And make that too immediate, personal, and emotional.

tagged: evolution, evolutionary psychology, politics, psychology, society, sustainability   

Samuel Bercholz: A guided tour of hell

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I went to an excellent talk with Samuel Bercholz and Pema Namdol Thaye at the Asian Art Museum earlier today. They are the author and artist of A Guided Tour of Hell: A Graphic Memoir. I can highly recommend the book. (Samuel Bercholz also happens to be the founder of the Shambala publishing company. I must have read hundreds of their books.)

A few things about hell. It’s created by our own mind, and more specifically by our beliefs and identifications. Beliefs and identifications are at odds with reality, and create unease and sometimes suffering. This hell is with us as long as we have these beliefs and identifications, whether in this human life or between incarnations. We create our own hell.

What’s the remedy? It’s partly to heal our very human trauma and wounds. And more to the point, to heal our relationship with our experience. To befriend our experience, independent of it’s content. To find kindness and even love for it. And to recognize our experience as awakeness and even love. And this goes for all of our experience, including other people, the world, ourselves, different parts of ourselves, and our own discomfort, pain, and suffering.

My own experience with hellish states. It’s a good reminder for myself. As I have written about before, I have gone through a difficult few years. Following a nondual opening that lasted a few months, I was plunged into chronic fatigue (CFS) and later PTSD. Adyashanti talks about how an awakening or opening can “take the lid” off anything suppressed or avoided in our mind, and that’s what happened to me. There was no chance of holding it back or pushing it away.

A huge amount of unprocessed material surfaced over the following months and years, and it led to PTSD and several months where I hardly slept and all I could do was walk in the woods in Ski, Norway. (While listening to the audio version of the dark night chapter of Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill and Adyashanti talking about the dark night and other topics.) Fortunately, I had some guidance by someone who had gone through it himself and understood (Barry Snyder) and I also did The Work and found TRE, both of which helped me tremendously.

And still, a great part of this process was something I just had to ride out. Practices and healings helped in taking the edge off some of it, but the vast bulk of it just had to live its own life and was something I had to find a way to live with, even if it often felt indescribably unbearable and overwhelming.

As so many describe, it has gradually tapered off although I still feel I am in it to some extent. I am very grateful for having found Vortex Healing which has been and is a great support for me in the healing and continued awakening process.

Note: As I wrote the section above, I was aware that this is a good example of hellish states but not a good example of how we can work with it. The unprocessed material that surfaces is something I have worked with extensively and continue to work on healing and clearing – mainly through inquiry (Living Inquiries, The Work), TRE, resting with it, and – these days – Vortex Healing. As the intensity has gradually decreased, it’s easier for me to work on it.

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tagged: autobiography, buddhism, dark night, hell, psychology, samuel bercholz, suffering, tension and trauma release exercises, the work of byron katie, tibetan buddhism   

The world as a dream

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I recently answered a set of questionnaires connected with a course using tools from different spiritual and psychological traditions.

One of the questions was (paraphrased): do you experience the world as unreal, as a dream?

Do you experience the world as unreal, as a dream?

In a psychological context, I would answer no since a “yes” could be taken as a symptom of schizophrenia. I don’t experience the world as unreal in that way.

In a spiritual context, or in the context of a spiritual emergence or emergency, the answer would be “yes”. The world is revealed as consciousness (Spirit, love), as insubstantial, as a dream. The world and dreams both happen as and within consciousness.

Although the questionnaire was presented as part of a course using spiritual tools, I did answer “no” since the questionnaire itself was clearly a standard psychological one.

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tagged: own dream, psychology, questionnaires   

Is it who you are?

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I was recently interviewed by a friend who is in Robert Keegan’s Order of Consciousness certification program.

One of the questions he asked was is it who you are? That orientation to see what happens as a gift, is it who you are?

It’s almost impossible to answer such a question simply. It completely depends.

To others who have known me for a while, the answer is probably yes. I have had that orientation since my teens.

If I answered a questionnaire aimed at detecting that orientation, I may score quite high. In terms of that questionnaire, it’s who I am – at least at the time of answering the questions.

In the big picture, it’s obviously not who I am.

At a human level, it’s not really who I am. I wasn’t that way, at least not consciously, before my mid-teens. There are moments where it goes in the background and something else is stronger. It may change in the future.

And I am really that which experience happens within and as. I am that which this orientation comes and goes within.

So is it who I am? Yes and no. It depends. It’s complex. And I am sure my answer will change if you ask me in a month, or a year, or ten years.

tagged: psychology, robert keegan