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dblaney
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Psychotherapy
#5671809 - 05/25/06 07:46 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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For a number of years now I've been undergoing psychotherapy (psychoanalysis or whatever you'll call it). For quite a while I've seen it as something that is ultimately helpful and beneficial to my life. And indeed, it has helped give me a much more rational and reasonable outlook on life and many personal issues.
However, since I've started walking a more 'spiritual' path, I've found that it isn't as useful anymore. Now it seems like I go there and just brood over my personal problems, stagnating and becoming more emotionally involved than I normally would.
I'm curious as to what you all think about psychotherapy and it's value along any spiritual path.
Quote:
Some people have come to meditation after working with traditional psychotherapy. Although they found therapy to be of value, its limitations led them to seek a spiritual practice. For me it was the opposite. While I benefited enormously from the training offered in the Thai and Burmese monasteries where I practised, I noticed two striking things. First, there were major areas of difficulty in my life, such as loneliness, intimate relationships, work, childhood wounds, and patterns of fear, that even very deep meditation didn’t touch. Second, among the several dozen Western monks (and lots of Asian meditators) I met during my time in Asia, with a few notable exceptions, most were not helped by meditation in big areas of their lives. Many were deeply wounded, neurotic, frightened, grieving, and often used spiritual practice to hide and avoid problematic parts of themselves.
When I returned to the West to study clinical psychology and then began to teach meditation, I observed a similar phenomenon. At least half the students who came to three-month retreats couldn’t do the simple "bare attention" practices because they were holding a great deal of unresolved grief, fear, woundedness, and unfinished business from the past. I also had an opportunity to observe the most successful group of meditators - including experienced students of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism - who had developed strong samadhi and deep insight into impermanence and selflessness. Even after many intensive retreats, most of the meditators continued to experience great difficulties and significant areas of attachment and unconsciousness in their lives, including fear, difficulty with work, relationships wounds, and closed hearts. They kept asking how to live the Dharma and kept returning to meditation retreats looking for help and healing. But the sitting practice itself, with its emphasis on concentration and detachment, often provided a way to hide, a way to actually separate the mind from difficult areas of heart and body.
- Jack Kornfield http://www.buddhanet.net/psymed1.htm
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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Icelander
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5671985 - 05/25/06 09:05 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Well friend, that was a great quote from Kornfield. I have noticed the same. Here's the problem though. Therapists by and large are not qualified to practice their profession. Most read the books and turned in their homework and thought they might just find out how to cure their own emptiness in the process but didn't quite get there and so figured they might be able to fake it and teach.
If you find a good one you're really in business and it shouldn't take years but months instead IMO.
Still if your intent is good you will find benefit in a almost any therapeutic session at first. Fairly quickly you will see how to be your own therapist and move on.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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DoctorJ


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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: Icelander]
#5671991 - 05/25/06 09:07 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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"Skip the therapist and meditate. Skip school and go to the library."
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: DoctorJ]
#5672012 - 05/25/06 09:16 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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unfinished business is the nature of everything, how to cope?
for a while some "there, there-apy" is most reassuring. some of the "there, there-apists" are very good to spend time with.
meditation can be good for facing unfinished business, but it can also be abused as anything else: In the name of meditation, consider how self hypnosis works when control is handed to the apprentice who stole the master's hat. Some believe that is good meditation, and you can see where it might form a nasty moebius of error compounding error.
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_ 🧠 _
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Icelander
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: DoctorJ]
#5672050 - 05/25/06 09:35 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Re-read the Kornfield quote.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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Icelander
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5672162 - 05/25/06 10:19 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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I passed your quote on to a Buddhist friend of mine and I thought I would share his response with you.
I agree with the quote. I have always liked a synthesis of meditation and psychotherapy and love reading those who do both simultaneously. I feel rebirthing breathing goes deeply into emotions and has a somewhat different framework than traditional hinayana buddhist meditation. In terms of Buddhist psychology, I think that many got a kind of enlightenment, including myself, from clearing the 7th layer of consciousness (which gets enlightened when ego consciousness is pierced and seen as an illusion), but have not cleared the enormous 8th layer (roughly equivalent of emptying out the entire storehouse of the subconscious mind). After my own enlightenment experience, after two weeks of tremendous bliss, my 8th consciousness started opening up and flooding me as that I was in a suicidal depression for 6 straight months, it was after this period that I found the teachings of Krishnamurti, and entered into a two week enlightenment experience. It felt like I had again cleared the 7th consciousness. It is as if the 8th consciousness keeps dumping its content into the 7th when it gets activated and we keep on clearing it. There seems to be a way of joining the 9th and the 7th to handle this content better, but what I have gotten is that clearing the 8th is a very very very big thing, since some of the stuff is lifetimes old. Almost all my past life time memories come from working through the spontaneous contents of the 8th consciousness that appear in my 7th consciousness. I got that even Buddha, at least after his 40 day meditation on to enlightenment, did not attain this, since he had a healing of losing is his mother in childhood about midway in his teaching journey. I am clear that enlightenment, far from being the final end of the journey, is merely a better basis for moving through subconscious content and that growth just takes on a different form. I have been reading recently of a Buddhist Lama who was thrown into the Dalai Lama's prison for being too radical and who got beaten up by other monks when he argued that "Buddhahood" (eg perfect enlightenment) was an illusion. I think I understand his point and it is a logical extension of Madhyamika Buddhist Philosophy. It attempts to find the middle way between what I would call "concretism" and "nihilism". Conscretism is the belief that things substantially exist as solid independant entities rather than as conceptualizations of processes that cannot be separated from the wholeness of life and nihilism is the belief that nothing really exists and nothing really matters (except maybe having fun). In other words, if you concretize enlightenment you form one fallacy and if you assert that it does not exist at all you form the other. The lama was playing "mara's advocate" in order to balance the equation. What I do notice after the enlightenment is that I can kind of look backward within myself any time I want and notice a radiance there.
Blessings,
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
Edited by Icelander (05/25/06 10:19 AM)
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dblaney
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: Icelander]
#5672238 - 05/25/06 10:45 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Wonderful letter, thanks for posting that!
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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Syle
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5672315 - 05/25/06 11:05 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Wow, that is a very good read. Tell your friend thanks Ice.
-------------------- https://kenaisigh.bandcamp.com/ <- Just completed the 2021 RPM challenge for February - An EP in one month (5 songs or 20 minutes). Check it out!
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niteowl
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5672334 - 05/25/06 11:08 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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I think that therapy in concert with meditation, is the key to understanding and solving you issues.
-------------------- Live for the moment you are in nowDon't be bogged down by your pastDon't be afraid of what lies in your future
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Veritas

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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5672394 - 05/25/06 11:20 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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I spent several years in a pre-counseling Psychology program at my University, and left just short of entering the Master's program because I could not reconcile the therapeutic methods I was being taught with what I was discovering in my spiritual work.
In the years since I left school, I have been studying and practicing a synthesis of psychological and spiritual therapeutic techniques.
(BTW, interesting that the root word of pyschology is "psyche," or spirit. The field seems to have distanced itself from this definition.)
IMO, the most beneficial and effective therapy would include short-term (6 months at most), goal-oriented psychotherapy sessions, in combination with body work (massage, nutrition, exercise, energy), journaling, group discussion/support, meditation & personal retreats.
We are not limited to our mind, body or spirit, so therapeutic methods which focus on one aspect to the exclusion of others are ineffective. Only through holistic therapy is it possible to re-balance and re-align what has fractured.
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5673817 - 05/25/06 05:09 PM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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I've been practicing psychotherapy since 1985 in a part-time (and now VERY part-time) capacity. My full-time position is clinical counseling of adolescents, which does not get as deep as psychotherapy.
With regard to doing therapy: one can only take a client as far as you yourself have gone. I have a spiritual life which determines all the other facets of my life. This is not the case for the majority of counselors, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists that I have met. Their models for understanding human development are secular, social and non-spiritual for the most part. One can find clergy who are also Pastoral Counselors, but they usually work within the framework of their own denomination. Thus, if one is seeking outside of their faith, they are usually not too helpful.
I know of a psychologist who became a Jungian analyst. He is into S&M and allegedly 'illegal' porn. One of my own Jungian analysts (now deceased) tried to seduce me (a straight man) away from my ex-wife with the promise of getting me into Jungian training in Zurich. He was a Catholic priest (what a surprise - more like Psycho-the-rapist ). Jungians have a reputation for being 'spiritual,' but I was treated very badly when I applied for training. They did not like my use of psychedelics, among other things.
Psychotherapy means 'care of the psyche [soul]' and only certain psychotherapists have a spiritual life which informs their practice of psychotherapy. For them, the word 'psyche' retains the meaning of 'soul,' and not only 'mind.' From a Kabbalistic model, non-spiritual psychotherapists work within the 'astral triangle' which enjoins sex and the unconscious, thinking and feeling. The spiritual-oriented psychotherapist acknowledges the movement of transcendence, of spiritual breakthrough or rebirth, which establishes a transpersonal Center as a new center of Consciousness (a change from ego to [Higher] Self - an upward move to Tiphereth in the 'Ethical Triangle'). A Chakra model has non-spiritual therapists addressing survival/sexuality and power/status/wealth issues almost exclusively (1st/2nd and 3rd chakra motivations).
Spiritual techniques (meditation, contemplation, prayer, etc.) are not substitutes for a psychotherapy that encompasses pre-personal, personal and transpersonal aspects of human awareness. Kornfield backs up this claim. Since I am analytically-oriented, I understand the object of the approach to make one one's own analyst eventually. This is like the analytical approach of Jnana [Gyan] Yoga - the Yoga of Knowledge [Gnosis] - such as that taught by Sri Ramana Maharshi. This is not to demean other techniques in other traditions, but the acquisition of real detachment must be discerned from psychological defense mechanisms like denial. Any state of mind that is actually a defense mechanism will break down eventually, revealing a very untransformed personality beneath. Individuals may require the assistance of a psychotherapist just as one requires the assistance of a surgeon or a dentist - you cannot do certain things by yourself and get it right. Many people have significant obstacles in their psyche that prevent them from rising to a spiritual identity. Practicing a spiritual technique in the 'attic' of one's edifice with an [unconscious] 'basement' that has baggage and lurking spooks [complexes] to draw one's awareness downward, first needs to 'clean house' from the bottom up before [s]he sits on an Indian rug or zafu in the 'attic.'
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Basilides
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Quote:
Any state of mind that is actually a defense mechanism will break down eventually, revealing a very untransformed personality beneath.

I love how that's put. It coorelates with alot of the quotes I've read in the Gnostic Gospels, such as "It is what you bring out within you that will save you" or metaphors that describe righteousness as something that 'sprouts' from within, through the brush of the personality.
Just what is the untransformed personality though? Is it un-used essence/consciousness? And is it ever experienced by those who are defined by the egoic defense mechanism?
I'm also reminded of one of Stephen Hoeller's metaphors, that the defense mechanism is alot like investing a great amount of time trying to fit into a "painting" or "portrait", only to eventually have that painting removed suddenly, revealing a personality that in the end, has absolutely nothing at all.
I suppose the barnacles calcify our personalities somewhat. In the Journey The cleaning starts with a massive overhaul of the basement, some dusting in the house, and then finally a break from it all in the attack, before the cylinder attic window pops open, bringing in the Sun.
I need to research some Jungian stuff, it seems like a scientific approach to metaphysical truth just about
--------------------
    "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: Basilides]
#5674923 - 05/25/06 10:16 PM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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"Barnacles." Your word answered your response from me! I often use that word and it is the encrustations - the husk - that most people (Hylics) seem to identify themselves as.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is said that for the unprepared, the Clear Light of Unmitigated Reality is so shocking and horrifying that they will take refuge in any womb that they can hide in. That ephemeral, ostensibly 'afterlife' state speaks to the here and now. People will lie and make sh*t up rather than admit that they don't know something, or to win an argument. People are SO identified by their egos and its defenses that even providing such a person with a true fact is just too much Light for their pathetic little egos to handle. Humility and gratitude for providing Truth are not valued, not appreciated. Only abysmally ignorant petty ego aggrandizement is appreciated. They feel small and being shown the Truth about something makes them feel wrong, shamed, even smaller and it hurts their egos and they become angry. Crucify their own ego voluntarily?! Ridiculous! Crucify YOU for setting them straight.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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fireworks_god
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Quote:
MarkostheGnostic said: In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is said that for the unprepared, the Clear Light of Unmitigated Reality is so shocking and horrifying that they will take refuge in any womb that they can hide in.
Which is the explanation for reincarnation, correct?
 Peace.
--------------------
If I should die this very moment I wouldn't fear For I've never known completeness Like being here Wrapped in the warmth of you Loving every breath of you
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Icelander
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Correct. And one big benefit of the so called ego death experience. You become more prepared for the Big Kahuna. You might just take more time in womb selection (spiritual family as opposed to crack whore) even if you can't reach enlightenment.
Even if none of that is true the so called ego death experience provides the same benefits in the here and now.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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fireworks_god
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: Icelander]
#5676616 - 05/26/06 10:50 AM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Awareness is like a purifying wildfire. The more you conduct it in more effective manners, to different degrees, the more it will naturally transform "you" into a form that can work with awareness to greater degrees and on greater levels, which means that one will be more directly perceiving reality and will thus more deeply understand reality.
Awareness kicks ass. 
 Peace.
--------------------
If I should die this very moment I wouldn't fear For I've never known completeness Like being here Wrapped in the warmth of you Loving every breath of you
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Icelander
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Yes!
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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dblaney
Human Being

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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: Icelander]
#5677036 - 05/26/06 12:43 PM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
Icelander said: Yes!
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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TacticalBongRip
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Re: Psychotherapy [Re: dblaney]
#5677699 - 05/26/06 04:55 PM (17 years, 8 months ago) |
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To the OP: I know the feeling you are speaking of in regards to seeing the therapist and feel like your not making much progress. I used to go to a psychologist (his style he called care-giving) that caused drastic and positive changes on my perception of reality. At some point however I became unmotivated to go see him so I stopped doing it.
There are times when I want to go back and brush up on things but when I feel that way I start thinking of the questions and things I would ask if I spoke with him again. Suddenly the answers I were looking for become clear and I realize they were within my mind all along.
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Icelander
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-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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