Friday, June 2, 2017

SOULCRAFT AS PSYCHOTHERAPY JUNE & JULY, 2017



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?






[1] Frank Wright: Emotional Healing, (1995)Inner World Pub.
[2] Leslie Greenberg, Emotion Focused Therapy, (2002)
[3] by Bill Platkin, Nature and the Human Soul – Cultivating Wholeness & Community in a Fragmented World. (2008)3

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