The transformation of your life is the end of the remedial existence, the end of the rule of your childhood ego. The infant gets out of the driving seat of your car; the demon child no longer rules the roost. The very platform on which your life rests changes for good.

Standing alone we need no other to describe or define who we are. The past is now the past with no attachments – merely the road that has brought us to here. All our curses have turned into blessings. We experience a single-minded sense of purpose and guidance is transparent to us in the very next step.

No longer running or trying to escape from ourselves in any of our facets, abhorrent behavior, faulted sub-personalities, or adverse traits, our journey to wholeness has allowed us to embrace everything we are attached to, either positively or negatively. In order to arrive at the Threshold we must re-own our projected parts, as in the following two examples.

Sheila: Repressing Vibrant Life

Sheila was a 36-year old woman, a mother of three young children. Her husband Ben had a small company and she worked in personnel and administration in a supportive capacity to him. Among the employees were at least two young women who attracted Sheila's censure. They were floosies, dressing and dying their hair, fawning and flirting around the men in the company and of course her husband who she felt fiercely protective of... and possessive and jealous. Sheila exhibited a repressed sexuality. In her conservative somewhat old-fashioned dress sense, her body language and posture, and her cultivated plainness. Sometimes, even often, I began to see a vibrant, alive, very attractive, sexual woman beneath the fusty facade. Slowly the history of her relationship and encounters with the male world emerged. The unwanted attention of several older men in puberty and adolescence, the awkwardness of her father in reaction to her budding pubescent body, a lascivious older man who was her boss, and in her early twenties a near rape which she just managed to talk her way out of. She had married Ben, a safe and mild hardworking man. He felt secure, unthreatening, and undemanding sexually, relationally and intimately. She had found certainty and protection in a compromise of sheltered repression. Her heavily concealed wildness and sensuality banished to the unconscious it could only emerge in the way it did in animosity and aversion toward women who were overtly sexy – the polar opposite of the image she had constructed for her personal protection. Her therapy work involved taking back her projections onto the young women at work and of course others too and living into and owning the sensual, sexually attractive, vibrant woman she really was.

Phillip: Unfulfilled Life

A 52-year old man called Phillip had worked in menial jobs all his life. In therapy session he brought an extraordinary dream. A golden winged man flew into his home and presented him with a silver ball. Phillip, feeling uncertain, dropped the ball and it smashed into pieces. The golden winged man simply smiled and presented Phillip with another identical ball. The smashed ball represented the shame and humiliation which had shattered his dreams of an academic life. In school years Phillip had a series of seminal damaging encounters with insensitive sadistic teachers who had severely criticized his work and poor academic performance. Shying away from such treatment and the hurt and pain it brought him, he had chosen the safer route of unskilled physical work which carried no high expectations or savage censure. Since he had reached his fifties however he had a nagging feeling, an insistent sense of the lack of fulfillment in his life, perhaps something could yet be accomplished, some inner thirst satiated.

Sheila had projected her innate sexuality; Phillip had disowned his intellectual side. Each had to re-own these parts of themselves in order to attain inner wholeness and integration. Clients will always have a disowned or projected aspect of themselves which they see in others and interact with in their relationships. Re-owning these parts over time results in inner integration, the condition of psychological wholeness.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #175

There is a feeling of great security in resistance. Resistance gives us that solid sense of refusal, of the hard, reassuring solidity of a wall when our back is pressed up against it. Our backs against the wall feels good, it evokes the Americanism – the expression when a friend has “got our back,” meaning they are looking out for us. But whether we are looking back into the past, wanting to run backward, having someone watch our back, watching someone else’s back, or wanting back what we have given away or lost, any reference whatsoever to the past is dying – dying in order to be reborn as our new self, our true self, our natural identity before the conditioning, the indoctrination, and the struggle to survive in life came about and absorbed our spontaneity, our vibrancy, and our responsiveness to existence.

We are called upon to be self-referring, to be truly adult, to be not authoritarian but authoritative. To rely on our inner knowing as well as our inner unknowing is a demand now and it relies in turn on the bringing together of our unconscious and conscious worlds, our inner and outer worlds, past and future into the relative present, as our wholeness and our daring strives to overcome our resistance.

Dreams of Birth

People at this stage may have experience important dreams of giving birth. These dreams may help to describe and point out where they are still holding on. Here is one such dream:

This dream expresses the fears the dreamer has about transformation. The new birth is the transformational process; the baby represents the transformed self. Transformation has not yet occurred hence the lack of attention to the baby or the unreality of it since he doesn’t appear in the dream. The dreamer fears that she may not be able to trust the birth process. She is worried that all her plans, predictions, and preferences for the birth or transforming will be ignored. Not only that she is anxious that the process will not be complete and that everything will be sewn up, or finished with the source of her baby’s nutrients, the placenta (which represents her therapy, her inner work which nourished her inner journey and brought her to this point) concealed and atrophying inside her, perhaps poisoning her… that her entire inner journey will have been for no purpose at all like a placenta discarded, no longer useful. The sister who appears in the dream represents poignamt betrayal, particularly because she was close to her in waking life.

Dreams of Making Love

Dreams of birth go hand in hand with dreams of love-making and intimacy as we approach the threshold. Here is an example; the dreamer is the same woman:

I am making love with my first boyfriend, Sean. We have had a lot of difficulty attempting to be alone together and now it is lovely, beautiful, and very sensual. The windows are wide open and I begin to feel a little uncertain about people looking in and seeing us. It is Sunday morning and I am due to be at church. I’m not sure who I want to please, but I feel a lot of pressure to attend the church service, when really I want to stay in bed with Sean.

The first boyfriend refers to first love – original primal love, which is psychologically the love of ourselves in our whole form or pure form, unsullied by life’s insinuations or insults. At the brink of transformation the dreamer refers back to the closest, nearest event of a primal nature in her life. Making love symbolizes union (remembering other kinds of sexual activity are likely to symbolize something else). The windows are open showing us that the dreamer is concerned or unconfident about others or perhaps about being seen, perhaps in her transformed state. She is concerned about what she will become when she has passed the Threshold.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #174

People carry some dominant theme through their statement of presence. This theme is the summation of their overall impression. It may be, I am not here: the face is vacant in expression; the physical body makes no impact and is energetically dull. It could be, I am excited, or overexcited, to be here: there is expectancy, anticipation, and you may feel drawn into the transaction. It may be, Look at this huge weight I am carrying, as the client slowly sits in the seat with apparently great effort and the very air has to move as the words release from their mouth. It can be the seductive and endearing, You will like me and it is imperative that you find me attractive: the client plays with facial expressions and physical poses and postures, expressing with the face, legs, hands, and feet, and the torso in an orchestrated attempt to incite positive feeling.

Other dominant presenting themes include: I am interesting because I am full of secrets, I am haunted, Don’t touch me or I will break, You’re not as good as (my dad, my previous therapist, my old boyfriend), or the disdainful You’re just not good enough.

Primary Modes of Access

Each of us favors one of the three centers – mental, emotional, and physical – as a way to encounter life. Some of us lead the encounter with our minds, some with our hearts, and others with our physical bodies. Those of us who favor the mind are systematic, organized, and analytical. We approach events conceptually and rationally. Emotionally-led people may strike us as irrational or unreasonable and physically-led people we may judge as inferior or at least more basic than us.

Those of us who favor the heart are emotional and often demonstratively spontaneous. We tend to find mentally-focused people over-complex, dry, and guarded. The physically-led person appears reckless and shallow, as they meet life events with mere intention and motivation, lacking in emotion, which appears colorless and futile to the emotionally-dominated person.

The physically-led person is tactile, strong, and will-centered. They may be involved with Tai Chi, martial arts, sports, marathon running, or yoga. If they are it will be a powerful pursuit for them, an intense and necessary part of their life in which they experience themselves in a connected and significant way. Mental people are too airy for the physically-centered person, although they may secretly admire them. People with mental access move and communicate in a world of mystery and obscurity to the person with primary physical access. To some degree similarly, the emotionally led person is a bewildering event, exhibiting overmuch feeling, passion, and sensitivity with no active justification.

Know yourself and know your clients, using your body awareness to understand more deeply how the world and others in it appear.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #173

We must learn to feel the world and with feeling the world, feel and truly experience “the other.” Experiencing the other we see past the forces of indoctrination. In time we start to see things as they are. When the thought "other" no longer takes up a position between you and I – this position creating a screen, a curtain between us – we can genuinely let “the other” in. We may even be able to merge in the truth that we are One.

This learning to feel should not be taken too lightly. Just three words and as with so much in personal growth, therapy, and inner work, three words that might sound light or trite or inconsequential. We might write it off – oh yes learning to feel, I get it, I see. But learning to feel is profound, highly significant, and intensely serious.

It reminds us of the insight of the heroes in sci-fi novels and movies like Brave New World, 1984, or The Matrix. It is like the altered states we can experience through hallucinatory or mind-bending pharmaceuticals. Then again more accurately and closer to home it is like those life-changing meetings with transcendent Reality, God, or the Mystery that has been experienced by humankind since recorded time began.

Feeling may be natural but we have learnt to shut down to such an extent that we habitually experience only a very small amount of our total potential. The visceral psycho-physical discovery of feeling in its true capacity and potential can be overwhelming. Therefore it should be approached gently – not because we want to hold back, but because a sudden, radical change for the organism can be such a shock that the suppressors and the contraction that previously held the organism in an unnatural state of feeling suppression may strengthen to meet the perceived threat in reaction to the sudden change.

As is most often the case in effective inner work, slow gentle progress is best, most thorough, and most importantly most genuine and lasting. Ego-forces have had us in their grip for many years by the time we come to inner work. At one time these defenses were a viable effective answer to what we were facing in our lives. The most effective way to let them go is with understanding and with love.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Today I'll bake; tomorrow I'll brew.
Then I'll fetch the queen's new child.
It is good that no one knows
Rumpelstiltskin is my name.

(from "Rumpelstiltskin" the German folktale in Grimm's Fairy Tales 1812)

The extraordinary subject of family dominates and pervades our existence as individual and collective beings throughout our life. Who can see their family clearly and vividly? Who can name the qualities, the attributes of the individual members and the collective giant of family itself? Knowing yourself and others is not enough; there are also the relationships between each of the members. In a family of four, there are 48 basic relationships in play (relationship to self and the other three, relation to you from each of these plus the perceived and possibly erroneous relationships you project). Is it any wonder that family dynamics are so notoriously dense?

In myths and fairy tales from around the world we find the motif of the mysterious helper who strikes a bargain with the distressed heroine and is eventually disempowered when his name is discovered and spoken (see The Name of the Helper: Aarne-Thompson tale type 500). The German folktale Rumpelstiltskin is perhaps the one we are most familiar with. Briefly, a boastful father claims his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king incarcerates her in a tower and threatens to kill her unless she can perform the miraculous task. In her despair, a stranger appears and produces the gold in exchange for her necklace and ring. The king offers to marry or kill her on the third night unless she produces even more gold than before. This time the stranger produces the gold in exchange for her first-born child. She marries the king, has a baby boy, and the stranger appears to collect his reward. She offers all her riches, for she is now the queen, and eventually the stranger agrees to delaying taking possession of the child for three days, during which time if she can guess his name correctly he will relinquish his claim. 

Now here comes a highly significant variation. The queen discovers the stranger's real name. when he is found in the dead of night, dancing around a fire singing a rhyme. But in some versions it is the king who hears the stranger's song, in other's it is a traveling artisan or someone who works for the king, in others it is the girl's parents, and in still others it is the girl herself.

The name of course is Rumpelstiltskin -- a name you could never have guessed. But whether you, your parents or the king discover it and release you from the follies, the intrigues, and the hidden dynamics of your family belief system and prison is crucial.

Therapy is the pursuit in which we reveal our truth, our essence -- in which we discover our true name. The dwarf, the stranger, the trickster are merely versions of an animus that is attempting to thwart us from that discovery. When we are confident in our inner work we understand that the answer is within. Hence in a German version of the story "Kugerl," we read, "The girl was satisfied with this answer, and she went home."

The hungry ghosts, the imps, and those inner beings who seek to take from us manipulatively are overcome by speaking their names: Rumpelstiltskin, Hipche-Hipche, Doubleturk. The answer, of course, is found at home, or within.

"If my bride knew that my name is Doubleturk, she wouldn't take me!"

Within you -- and within each client you work with -- are the parental images you have taken in throughout your early years. Also there is the authoritarian voice or image, the part of you with a will to power in the name of protection, in the name of survival. And finally there is the essence, the kernel of yourself, your own soul or psyche which is the one that needs to rise to the challenge and free itself from the chains and oppression of the family matrix, outmoded, anachronistic, and irrelevant as it is now.

This idea of having power over something you can name has great relevance in family exploration in psychotherapy. As we work, as therapist or client, through the mazes and labyrinths of our family history, clarity arises from our acts of naming. As we get these words, notions, and descriptions "right" -- that is more true, more vivid, more real -- so family conditioning loosens its hold progressively over our lives. When finally we have the word for it (figuratively), our attachments dissolve.

Naming the stranger, the dwarf, the half person is by reflection naming ourselves. By naming what we reject, we recognize what we are prepared to accept. What your client aspires to, what motivates them, their intentionality and their attitude and resilience to overcome challenges and discover their true nature -- these are the qualities that determine the outcome of their personal process. Will they discover themselves or not? Will they take the complete course -- the one that only they can know, the one that is designated within them -- and learn to speak their own name?

Discovering the name of the trickster reveals to us our own truth, our own completeness, our wholeness and wholeness has been the goal of depth psychotherapy since the Upanishads, since counseling began.

Fairy tales are of childhood. The characters and the narratives are like family stories, symbolic of inner dynamics and reflective of the time when we are learning to make sense of the world, when everything appeared to be black and white.

Here I sit, carving gold,
My name is Holzrührlein Bonneführlein.
If the mother knew that,
She could keep her daughter.

("Dwarf Holzrührlein Bonneführlein" in Märchen und Sagen aus Hannover 1854)

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].