OUR APPROACH
This space invites tough questions: "how am I not being honest with myself? "What's really keeping me stuck?" The reward is coming more and more into alignment with the basic peace and integrity of the truth. Where empathy-heavy counselling sessions might lightly endorse your bad habits, the sessions in this space balance compassion with precision of inquiry. Examining beliefs, we can use the mind like a scalpel: direct and precise. You might use this space to approach a problem like an engineer building a bridge: noticing all the details, not settling for a quick and sloppy glance, but holding the situation in mind until it's thoroughly known and clear in mind.
It seems holding clarity and depth of attention can reveal hidden truths in a situation that seemed at first impenetrable. Like dropping down through layers of dirty water and finding crystal clarity below all the murk. As the neuroscience researcher Ian McGilchrist observes, "The type of attention you pay governs what it is that you will find."
And on the other hand, the mind can be a jumping off point to discover what other forms of knowing might support usual ways of thinking...especially when ordinary thinking isn't bearing fruit. Maybe this space becomes one in which you hold a question over time, so that any answer that comes is threaded through with your own soul-work...so that what's discovered is unique to your own particular grounded wisdom... Or it could be that - in considering a cross-roads question - a whole assembly of different parts of you are brought in to contribute: intuition, gut instinct, the wisdom of the emotions at play, the silent knowing of the heart.
So...this space is one in which we can work to solve problems. But it’s also one in which you might explore your way into living from your own unique depth and inner compass…so that one day you might wake up and notice that your problem can’t find a place to persist in what you have become.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung
Jung's observation can land like a sledgehammer. Why is it that we find ourselves repeating patterns over and over again - even when the results are painful and frustrating? Both modern psychology and ancient spirituality point their finger at our hidden beliefs. We manifest in our outer world what we hold in our inner world. When the core beliefs we hold inside are unconscious, they manifest for us a life that may seem like it's been inflicted on us by angry gods or a cruel and unfeeling world. The choice to turn and face our core stories is a choice to shake off victimhood and take as much agency as possible in the shaping of our own lives.
It's usually the case that our core beliefs are embedded in our sense of reality that we never think to question them. This is where the structure of this program is useful: to provide a focused space in which beliefs can be pulled out and examined - held and turned over like a pebble in your hand. It helps here to be gently challenged. It's not always comfortable to be boxed into a structure in which you examine what you hold to be true. Our usual reflex is to look away. So here the intention is to not look away.
Meeting Difficult Situations as an Opportunity to Walk Your Spiritual Path
Here we're taking every situation - every relationship - as an opportunity to live from the values you most deeply want to embody. The point of course isn't to establish some impossibly high standards that to fall short of...but more to notice how any given situation is an opportunity to live from what's important to you. In some formats of traditional counseling, the hope is to solve a problem so that you can more easily return to a basic, productive alignment with the values of society at large. Here we take a different approach. As the Indian Sage Krishnamurti offered: "It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society". In this space then, every difficult situation you might encounter then gives you the chance to show up in a way that matches your own unique sense of a healthy perspective: one based on your own deeper commitments and devotions.
If you aspire to embody wisdom and compassion in the mode of Buddhism, then we look at every difficult situation as an opportunity to embody those qualities. If you'd like to live in a way that honors God in the way of the Christian tradition, then we look at difficult situations as opportunities to live righteously according to your own interpretation of the gospel.
Our work here then is to sit in the muck and grit and tension of human experience while supporting you in keeping your footing in the deeper perspective that matters most to you.
Going Deeper
Traditional counseling offers many tools for solving problems. In this program, we apply some of those tools. They work! And....
The invitation of this space includes a gentle challenge to the mindset of problem-solving itself. Traditional therapy asks us to deeply consider our thoughts and beliefs to test them for truth. This is often proposed as a way to solve problems. Here we take things a step further: we hold open a space to examine the belief that life is a conveyor belt of problems to fix. Spiritual traditions point us to the possibility of a different relationship to life. It could be that...rather than a grinding problem-solving mindset, we might find a way to meet situations lightly - with some faith in the world as something that can hold and support us. We might discover Silence as an exceptionally trustworthy advisor.
