Awakening psychotherapy is a joining of what traditionally has been two realms, the domains of of awakening and psychotherapy.
“Awakening psychotherapy” is a play on words. This article is in part about the action of awakening psychotherapy from a slumber. But isn’t psychotherapy already awake? Don’t many people in our culture regard psychotherapy as one of the portholes where the healing light of consciousness gets in? Aren’t almost all practitioners of psychotherapy themselves evolved beings of high levels of awakeness? Yes—and no.
Psychotherapy by and large operates on the basis of a paradigm so widespread that we almost all assume it is an inherent part of reality, almost all of the time. The paradigm is that of duality, meaning that reality seems split into two. There are observers—you, and me for example, and there is a world at a distance from our observing interior. And the two are separate.
This separate-seeming alive and aware interior lives within our bodies—and out there, at some distance from myself—is a largely inert world. My interior and the world’s exterior are perpetually at loggerheads. Life broadly consists of wrestling with the exterior world so as to produce the maximum comfort and security of my interior experience. Happiness is produced by the most successful subjugation, and everybody aspires to be the most successful subjugator possible: President of the United States; Donald Trump; Lady Gaga; Warren Buffett; Taylor Swift.
This separation—me from my world, me from you, me from my objectives in life, me from the me I want to be—is taken utterly for granted: we believe it is reality itself. Only very rarely does a person suffering from the consequences of this separation turn back towards the root of themselves to ask fundamental questions about what is going on.
Why am I suffering? The psychological swirl in response asks: Is my loneliness bad biochemistry; or perhaps simply a bad childhood? If I could get a good relationship together wouldn’t my loneliness vanish? So perhaps loneliness will be cured by working on my personality until it becomes capable of being in a good relationship, and that will stop the loneliness.
When anxiety is the issue: Am I just a weak and disempowered person who’s afraid of everything? What do I have to do to get more confidence? How come I’m such a wimp?
Depression impels us to worry: Maybe there’s something wrong with me forever. Life is fundamentally and essentially worthless, and so am I. I think a lot about ending my life.
But the deepest questioning about suffering doesn’t stop at the psychological. Heck, if we’re going to consider suffering can we please also include the fact that I am guaranteed to die, and if I have the blessing of old age that will most likely include a good deal of sickness?
What if we dive all the way into our experience? What if we head down and down within ourselves, tearing apart assumptions—such as that I am separate from my experience; that I am actually separate from the world; that I exist as a separate entity—until we have reached the inescapable? Then what? What if that which we took to be the fabric of reality; my separation from the world, for example—turns out to be simply an artifact of thought?
We have begun to enter the territory of spirituality, where meditators, mystics, saints and sages begin to speak their experience of awakening to a causeless reality entirely beyond assumptions, and not solely consisting of duality. Happiness and freedom from suffering turn out to be the inherent characteristics of this reality.
Most psychologists view this realm with suspicion. For one thing, how could duality be considered illusory when almost all of psychology is founded on the bedrock of it? And if saints and meditators have found the ultimate relief from suffering, I could be out of a job!
Psychotherapy is a remarkable achievement. Out of mesmerism, animal magnetism and Freud’s floundering efforts to heal by talking with people in distress has emerged an opening to compassion unprecedented in history. Virtual strangers go into a room together (or, in 2020’s, share a screen) and in the best psychotherapy, open their hearts to each other. The healing effects of this are simply astonishing. Lives are resurrected. Relationships revived. Power, strength, sovereignty and new depths of authenticity emerge out of the gloom of shadowed trauma and wounding. I have experienced this as a psychotherapist and as a patient, and I feel deeply grateful for the science and art of psychotherapy.
But psychotherapy is limited. Notwithstanding concepts like the intersubjective field, irrespective of neuroscientists of towering stature (Michael Gazzaniga, for example) asserting that there really is no separate self, despite the presence of an entire realm of transpersonal psychology, psychotherapy butts up against the limits of its paradigm of duality. And only the merest first tendrils of a psychotherapy of awakening—for awakening, toward awakening, intentionally opening to awakening—have begun to show above ground. A psychotherapy of awakening is just beginning to be born: Awakening Psychotherapy is a contribution to that birth.
