In time I am intending to publish a book entitled The Kitchen-Table Counselor. The idea, the central idea, of the book is that people care and that they talk to each other with the best of intentions the whole time. You speak to your lover, your husband, your kids, your friends, your relatives, your colleagues at work. And yet, much the same as many well-intentioned counselors, you may not be doing as much good as you would like to.

Something insidious and highly disempowering happened to humanity over the past couple of hundred years. It's called professionalization. Read the wonderful book Disabling Professions. The author is Ivan Illich. He will provoke questions and enquiry in you. The basic idea in the book is that people must be invalidated in order to maintain a professional workforce and create a hierarchical class construction.

The people in power in our world today have been and remain terrified of the billions of individuals who comprise the so-called masses. In Sacred Attention Therapy we seek to empower the individuals that comprise the masses. Just think what a great number of heartfelt, genuine and compassionate, intelligent and wise individuals could do in our world today. I don't hesitate to say that there is not one single politician, political spokesperson, religious leader in the world that deserves the backing and support of intelligent people. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and power in the 21st century has become an enormously complicated shadow play of puppets and ignominy and unfairness, subjugation and callousness to the degree that only the most thorough and complete scouring of the toxic hierarchies of power will be sufficient to bring about any manifest change.

We—you and I—are not without power and influence ourselves. You and I should, must, if we are to possess hope for the humanity, tend the light. We can do it in the most simple, direct, and influential of ways. Encourage and allow yourself and others to awaken to consciousness. The outside world is a direct reflection of the inner world of the individuals who live in it, who witness it, who relate to it.

One of the most potent tools when you sit with someone in distress is this: listen, learn to listen, listen with all of yourself. Allow the other to find their way. Don't try to help—enable, then empower them. Trust their inner process. Get out of the way and let them learn about their own innate humanity, inner wisdom, guidance, intelligence, their spirituality, soulfulness, their compassion and their love.

Now what would happen if everyone did that?

BLOG entry #13