Why I Traded In Psychotherapy for Spiritual Coaching.

The burning questions which kept me growing personally and professionally over the last 13 years as a therapist all revolved around the integration of spirituality and psychology. East vs. West...Waking up vs. Growing up...  No-self vs. healthy self.  A perennial, sometimes agitating, dialogue between a Psychotherapist and a Zen Priest was always on the surface.

 About a year ago, the questions stopped surfacing so much.   The irreconcilabilities of the developmental views of psychology and the awakening views of spirituality began to melt away.   Looking back, I can see they were integrating within a larger whole.

This was, not ironically, around the time I began to feel the role of psychotherapist drying up and my work became less energized. I followed my gut, started winding down my practice and nine months later closed shop.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that my comments are in a context as a person who still does psychotherapy as a client at times. I’ve done about 150 sessions. I also want to say that for 12 years I LOVED being a therapist.

God bless psychotherapy!

In spite of agreeing with much of the psychological ontology, I felt shackled in a hangover of the dogmas of pathology.  Furthermore, I saw the roots of the linear, scientistic, rational paradigm contributed to a collective demand for finding causality and “fix it” strategies I could no longer happily perform.

Gradually,  I’ve come to notice that a big part of our problem is how we are looking at the problem.  I got the sense that overall, when people think of a “psychotherapist” they are often enmeshed within a dogma of brokenness, of fragments, of “parts”. Even my Transpersonal Psychology training  which was lighter on science and heavy on relationality and full personhood, hinged on the unconscious drivenness to fix something.

Again, I believe that a western view of suffering, its causes and its alleviation, is of tremendous value.  Therapy works!  Mental illness is a real thing. There are definitely patterns to suffering, and whatever works in its alleviation, I support. 

But to press my point further,  the whole mode of thinking which gives us structures like numerical diagnostic codes of the American Psychological Association is reflective of our cognition of fragments rather than wholes.  Left brain development has almost completely overshadowed the right. Scientism (i.e scientific views solidified into dogma) mistakes people for “things” because its power in “objective” thinking sees only parts, not wholes.

 Scientism, is an example of how we see our problems through limitation, in this case, “objectively”.  This is not only true of how we treat ourselves but is likely to be among the underpinnings of the meta-crisis we are now confronting. It seems we’ve managed to conveniently distance ourselves from our environment, our bodies, our psychologies in hopes that a magic bullet is also “out there”.

What’s on the other side of the meta-crisis?  I don’t aim to oversimplify the complexity, but at the very least I propose an ethic and movement of “non-separation”  as a possible beacon toward resolution.  Less separation between us, among us, within us. Less separation from our environment, our communities, our virtues, and even our fears. In a word, Wholeness.

Wholeness provides a view from which to look at many problems differently.  I’m not beating a drum for any particular popular ideology but what would an economic system look like if we were able to see the “whole world?”  What would change in our habits of consumption if we could actually see the “whole earth”?  What about a whole city, whole town, whole village?  What about just seeing a family as a whole rather than its individuals?

My concern is fairly small.  It’s about seeing a whole person. It’s become a deep interest to see myself and others as whole.  When we agree to begin from wholeness and then address what may feel like fragments, parts, trauma, shadows a different kind of counseling process goes into motion.

 If we feel divided against ourselves, we are not coming from wholeness.  Wholeness is wholesome, virtuous, caring, round and accommodating.  It always wants to include more of us.  Wholeness sees pain as a doorway to more wholeness.  Opportunities are everywhere.

In terms of our meta-crisis, I’m an optimist.  I believe some hard days are ahead but that a “post-tragic” narrative may already be here, even as we are “hospicing modernity", that is, the scientific-materialist paradigm.  This narrative does not mean that the pain will go away, it means we will look at pain much differently. We will find whole new life purposes around working with ourselves and others in much more life affirming ways.

 And my bet is that spirituality, or any relevant spiritual system will fully include psychological wisdom even more so than psychology will include spirituality.  Our questions about suffering are becoming far too existential and complex for oversimplified scientific cause and effect models to handle. Even as psychology evolves, spirit is the larger whole, not the other way around.

I’m excited and curious to see how we are collectively going to confront our inner and outer challenges through the roads of “deliberately developmental” transformation, getting to work, and thereby acknowledging that the meta-crisis is inside us as much as it is “out there”.

I’m equally interested to see how we will collectively gather our inner and outer philanthropic resources to support, translate for, nurture and reassure, our families, friends, towns and globe for the difficulties and collapses which may come.  It’s not looking to me like it’s going to be easy but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be great.  Maybe we are in the biggest global transformation of humans yet. Maybe not. But if we were, who would we want to be?