THE NEXT DEVELOPMENT IN
THERAPY – SOULCRAFT
In the last blog, I was
describing the amazing research about the subconscious mind. The evidence
points to the fact that all emotions are contained in the subconscious. Ordinary
contemporary psychotherapy may have methods for ‘releasing’ feelings resulting
in some positive effects, but the emotions that are repressed are still left
incomplete and still affect our behaviour throughout life.
In the 1980’s there was a huge
evolution of the of experiential therapies that introduced ‘emotional release’ as
a path to healing. However, instead of freeing emotions, many of these therapies promoted a co-dependence between the therapist (guru) and the client.
Feeling the pain of a damaged
liver is not curing it. The same principle goes with emotional healing. Painful
emotions still are relegated to the deeper levels of our being. That is the
evidence presented in the book I mentioned in our previous blog by Frank
Wright: Emotional Healing, (1995)1.
Another very useful book on this
topic is by my good friend and colleague Dr. Leslie Greenberg: Emotion Focused Therapy,
(2002)2. Leslie trained with me at the Toronto Gestalt Institute and is a professor at
York University in Toronto, Canada.
Both books are extremely useful
in formulating therapeutic strategies to emotional healing. Yet, none is
mentioning the importance of soul work. Lately there is a new methodology
coming that explores the inner or deeper work called SOULCRAFT.
WHAT IS SOULCRAFT?
I found this word coined by Bill
Plotkin in his book: Nature and the Human Soul – Cultivating Wholeness &
Community in a Fragmented World. (2008)3. Bill is describing clearly what I was teaching or attempting to teach, in our
gestalt therapy training groups. For years I was advocating the importance of
soul and spirit in the training curricula of gestalt therapy.
I experienced my own soul
journey or soul initiation by early exploration of Buddhist teachings, Tibetan
wisdom, Zen meditation, Kundalini yoga and reading and listening to tapes by
Allan Watts, Gurdjieff, Osho, and the
Chinese wisdom of the I-Ching. I also explored the effects of peyote in Mexico
when I followed the path of Carlos Castaneda and his conversations with the
Yaki elder Don Juan.
At that time, I was not aware
that I was creating my own initiation journey of the soul. I was also very
fortunate in my role as lecturer at the University of Queensland in Australia, to
be able to have a six months sabbatical every three years of teaching. That
opportunity enabled me to take trips to many countries to do my studies and
research. My upcoming book is about my travels to fifteen alternative
communities around the world in 1985. That was a culmination of my experiences
to develop my soul. I will have the book available in the coming year.
Here I want to add the article
that comments about SOULCRAFT by Bill Platkin. I suggest you purchase his book
and get on that journey when you can.
SOULCRAFT vs. PSYCHOTHERAPY
Adapted from Bill Plotkin, Nature
and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
(New World Library, 2008).
When a woman or man has embarked
upon the journey of soul initiation (a rare pursuit in the contemporary world),
the primary focus ought to be soulcraft, not psychotherapy. Psychotherapy
itself will not support the encounter with soul. Therapy, in fact, might
distract from soul. For people in an emotional healing process, or in need of
one, soulcraft might be dangerously counter-therapeutic. For those on the
journey of soul initiation, on the other hand, soulcraft might be appropriately
and beneficially counter-therapeutic.
I’m defining psychotherapy here
as interpersonal practices aimed at helping the conscious self (the ego)
improve its adjustment to its social world and its emotional life. The goal of
psychotherapy, in this sense, is ego-growth, a personality more in touch with
itself emotionally and viscerally, more centered and calm, less conflicted in
its social relationships, more capable of empathy and intimacy, and more secure
economically and professionally. These goals are valid and important,
especially in the psychological stage of early adolescence I call the
Oasis. (By “psychological adolescence,”
I don’t mean an age range, but a developmental stage that most Western people
never grow beyond.) These goals of psychotherapy are also important anytime
later in life when we need to develop the personality’s foundational capacities
or to address emotional meltdowns or relational cul-de-sacs. Ego-growth is
important and foundational to our spiritual development in both the underworld
(soul) and upper-world (Spirit) senses of spiritual.
But psychotherapy itself (again,
as I’m defining it here) does not help us penetrate the veil of the
often-illusory life of the everyday middle-world, nor does it develop our
relationship with the transpersonal mysteries of soul and spirit.
Psychotherapy, when successful, helps us interpersonally and intra-personally,
but it does not directly support us to become transcultural visionaries who can
help change the world and support the Great Turning from egocentric to
ecocentric culture. As James Hillman and Michael Ventura audaciously put it in
the title of their 1993 book, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and
the World’s Getting Worse.”
This is, of course, not to say or
imply that psychotherapy has no value. Given egocentric society’s multiple
obstacles to successful ego-growth, psychotherapy is needed now more than ever.
But the goals of a soulcentric psychotherapy are not job satisfaction or
improved adjustment to a pathological society, but, rather, refined social and
emotional skills and enhanced personality-level authenticity - the goals of the
Oasis - which provide the foundations for the soul-rooted development of later
stages.
But Hillman and Ventura are
making an additional point. Psychotherapy, no matter how effective it might be,
has clearly not been enough to make the world a better place. Indeed, while the
popularity of psychotherapy increased exponentially during the course of the
twentieth century, the world got dramatically worse. It’s likely in fact that
egocentric psychotherapy has contributed to the degradation of the world by
encouraging a focus on narrowly defined personal needs rather than the greater
world’s urgent needs. Sometimes and in some ways, psychotherapy has encouraged
narcissism.
Hillman and Ventura suggest - and
I agree with them - that often the most effective therapy is active involvement
in making the world a better place through volunteer service. Not only does
service work contribute to a better world, it also engenders better, healthier
people.
Service work contributes to
psychological health in at least three ways. First, it provides a respite from
the self-obsession encouraged by therapy. Second, it builds self-esteem through
the experience of being useful, helpful, and a part of a meaningful effort
larger than one’s own life. Third, if it is true - as many have come to believe - that our emotional troubles are at least in part, and maybe substantially,
sourced in our recognition on some level that our world is threatened, then
service work promotes us to being part of the solution. When we engage in
activities that address a significant problem, we feel better (and less
helpless), and usually right away.
Egocentric psychotherapy does not
consider social, political, or environmental activism to be a therapeutic
intervention. But it is.
Soulcraft, however, takes yet
another step beyond therapy in that soulcraft, when
successful, engenders initiated adults - actively engaged visionaries of
cultural renaissance - and in that the efforts of initiated adults are our
primary hope for creating an ecocentric and soulcentric society, then soulcraft
(by whatever name) is one of the cultural practices we need in order to make
the world a better place. Life-enhancing social transformation is not often
facilitated by well-adjusted conformists but, rather, by actively engaged
visionaries who are both sad and angry about the state of our world, and who
are also deeply hopeful as they create and implement new cultural forms — new
ecocentric ways of doing business, healthcare, education, art, architecture,
agriculture, energy production, politics and government, psychotherapy, and
soulcraft.
Unlike psychotherapy, soulcraft’s
aim is neither for nor against saving our marriages or facilitating our
divorces, cultivating our social skills or friendships, enhancing performance
or enjoyment in our current careers, raising economic standing, ending our
depressions, helping us understand or express our feelings, gaining insight
into our personalities or personal histories, or even making us what we would
normally call “happier.” Any one of these outcomes might result from soulcraft,
but they are not its goal.
The goal of soulcraft is to help
people cultivate the relationship between their ego and their soul. This is
underworld business — business that
might, at first, make our surface lives more difficult or lonely, or less
comfortable, secure, or happy. Soulcraft practices prepare the ego to abandon
its social stability and psychological composure and to become an active, adult
agent for soul as opposed to its former role as an adolescent agent for itself.
Soulcraft can be
counter-therapeutic because it often involves - even requires - dissolution of
normal ego states, which can traumatize people who have fragile or poorly
developed egos, thereby further delaying, impeding, or reversing basic ego
development and social adjustment. A good foundation of ego growth - through
psychotherapy or otherwise - is required if soulcraft practice is going to
realize its ultimate promise of cultural evolution and soulful service to
community. A well-balanced ego is the necessary carrier of the gift of soul.
Soulcraft at the wrong time can
undermine the ego’s viability. Shadow work, for example, which helps us recover
rejected parts of ourselves, may not be the best idea for people in the early
stages of recovery from substance addictions, sexual abuse, or other emotional
traumas. A vision quest would not be advisable for a clinically depressed
person. The soulcraft use of entheogens, even if they were legal, would not be
wisely recommended to children, most teenagers, or others with poor ego
boundaries.
At the same time, psychotherapy
can interfere with soulcraft. To move closer to soul, an initiate might need to
leave a relationship, job, home, or role. Some therapists might discourage such
changes, fearing an abdication of “adult responsibilities,” a lost opportunity
for deepened intimacy, or economic self-destruction. Or a psychotherapy client
ready for a soul-uncovering exploration of her core or sacred wound might be
counselled — especially by a cognitive-behavioral therapist — that such a
journey is unnecessary. Some soulcraft practices – wandering alone in
wilderness, practicing the art of being lost, or a solo vision quest — may be
deemed nontherapeutic, too dangerous, or even suicidal. Or an egocentric
therapist might discourage efforts toward soul-rooted cultural change, thinking
his client is merely projecting personal problems onto the outer world.
Although sometimes therapists
would be wise to counsel against soulcraft work, at other times, if the
individual is ready for the descent or if a sacrifice, psychological dying, or
social-cultural risk is necessary to encounter or embody the soul, then such
counsel would impede the journey of soul initiation. Without an appreciation of
the soul’s radical desires, psychotherapy can interfere with psychological and
spiritual maturation and promote a non-imaginative normality that merely
supports people to be better-adapted cogs in a toxic consumer-capitalist
society.
Malidoma Somé , an African shaman
of the Dagara people, gives us an extreme example of how therapy and soulcraft
goals can diverge. When Dagara boys undergo their initiation ordeals, the
people of the village realize that a few boys will never return; they will
literally not survive. Why would the Dagara be willing to make such an
ultimate sacrifice? For the boys who die, this is certainly not a therapeutic
experience. Although the Dagara love their children no less than we do, they
understand, as the elders of many cultures emphasize, that without vision - without soul embodied in the lives of their men and women - the people shall
perish. And, to the boys, the small risk of death is preferable to the living
death of an uninitiated life. Besides, when we compare Dagara society with our
own, we find that an even greater percentage of our teenagers die - through
suicide, substance abuse, auto accidents, gang warfare, and military service - in their unsuccessful attempts to initiate themselves. For the Dagara, a few
boys perish while the rest attain true adulthood. For us, a larger portion of
teens perish and very few ever attain true adulthood. Which approach is more
barbaric?
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